Kristy Bowen

An innovative roadmap to facing our past and present selves Honest, aching, and intimate, self-elegies are unique poems focusing on loss rather than death, mourning versions of the self that are forgotten or that never existed. Within their lyrical frame, multiple selves can coexist—wise and nai¨ve, angry and resigned—along with multiple timelines, each possible path stemming from one small choice that both creates new selves and negates potential selves. Giving voice to pain while complicating personal truths, self-elegies are an ideal poetic form for our time, compelling us to question our close-minded certainties, heal divides, and rethink our relation to others. In Writing the Self-Elegy, poet Kara Dorris introduces us to this prismatic tradition and its potential to forge new worlds. The self-elegies she includes in this anthology mix autobiography and poetics, blending craft with race, gender, sexuality, ability and disability, and place—all of the private and public elements that build individual and social identity. These poems reflect our complicated present while connecting us to our past, acting as lenses for understanding, and defining the self while facilitating reinvention. The twenty-eight poets included in this volume each practice self-elegy differently, realizing the full range of the form. In addition to a short essay that encapsulates the core value of the genre and its structural power, each poet’s contribution concludes with writing prompts that will be an inspiration inside the classroom and out. This is an anthology readers will keep close and share, exemplifying a style of writing that is as playful as it is interrogative and that restores the self in its confrontation with grief.

Tervetuloa Pohjoismaiden suurimpaan verkkokirjakauppaan! Adlibris kannattaa sananvapautta, ja haluamme edistää kirjallisuuden ja tiedon saatavuutta.

I was apprenticed to the frenzied atmosphere, the verandas that open into dark wind... Bowen is apprenticed to the "frenzied atmosphere" and in it she finds the crucial minutiae, in it she finds skirts of night and a woman's heart as a wind-up bird. Bowen's poetry is where we go to read that heart-as old- time paper valentine and as fist of flesh: valved and valued...letters written with the bones of birds. So it is, so it was that Here, we came for the ghost of the word/ inside the other word: and here, in the bird museum we are haunted by all that is visual as it is visceral and Bowen, playful, brilliant, curator, reminds us that this place is a synaesthete's playground--where the eye partakes in the delicious but no less-so than the ear, for here: If you listen, you can hear the holes in the alphabet, sounds lit by the lamps of our bones. Like birds we might even rise, our lamp-lit bones: luminous and...fly in a perfect line. Ariana-Sophia Kartsonis