Diamonds

Camille Guthrie is the author of three books of poetry: Articulated Lair: Poems for Louise Bourgeois (Subpress, 2013), In Captivity (Subpress, 2006), and The Master Thief (Subpress, 2000). Her poems have appeared in such journals as At Length, Boston Review, Green Mountains Review, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, Poem-A-Day, and Tin House, as well as in several anthologies including the Best of American Poetry 2019 & 2020 (Scribner) and Art & Artists: Poems (Everyman’s Library). Guthrie has been awarded fellowships from MacDowell and the Yaddo Foundation. She received her MFA from Brown University and her BA in English Literature from Vassar College. The Director of the Undergraduate Writing Initiatives at Bennington College, she lives in rural Vermont with her two children.

“The poems in Diamonds were written by a tiger who survived divorce, single motherdom, middle age, and sleepless nights worrying about money and what clothes to wear, one who knows it could be worse but wants her revenge, which is―surprise―the revenge of an angel who possesses such intelligence, knowledge, charm, and wit that these poems, from Björk to Bosch, pay us in diamonds and bless us all.”―Mary Ruefle, Author of My Private Property and Madness, Rack, and Honey“Camille Guthrie’s Diamonds is a glorious feminist midlife scream, screed, and ode to the ‘paradoxes and oxymorons’ of a divorced mother’s struggles. With the dark formal wit of Philip Larkin and cutting rage of Sylvia Plath, Guthrie goes there, with hilarious piss and vinegar, on the Sisyphean defeats of an academic stranded; a mother burdened; a consumerist broke; a woman who’s had enough. Plundering the wisdom from Shakespeare, Keats, and Butler, along with the wisdom of online flotsam, Guthrie creates a fresh ribald collection that is all too relatable and unputdownable.”―Cathy Park Hong, author of Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning and Engine Empire