Diane Lockward – författare

Diane Lockward, more than any other poet now writing, exemplifies Garcia Lorca's definition of poet as the professor of the five bodily senses. She revels in sensory language, often lip-smacking language, and she can make the language of terror and loss as spine-tingling as the beauty of a last stab of sunset before it disappears. The Uneaten Carrots of Atonement, with its cryptic title, invites us to join her in nothing less than a poetic banquet where we are seduced by the "Red of the raspberry, its drupelets a nest of sexual seeds, / and the music, pepper hot and red," or challenged by the never-ending unwinding of Lockward's interior landscape seeking its exterior expression in the physical world around her: "I build a nest of silken floss / and tiny twigs, / watch the lives on the other side." Make no mistake, though, the artistic weaving in these poems is tough as knots that "hold their weight, that won't come undone." This book is a feast to which Garcia Lorca himself would give a five-star rating.  

            —Kathryn Stripling Byer, North Carolina Poet Laureate, 2005-2009 

Why do dolls compel us so much? What are their meanings? What lessons do they have to teach us? The Doll Collection explores these questions. This wonderful anthology of poems asks us to rethink dolls. Not just toys, dolls signify much more than childhood. Dolls shape our thinking about the female body, about race and class. Dolls influence our understanding of childhood. Symbols of perfection, they both comfort and terrify. Dolls represent, as Freud would say, the “uncanny.” They are replicas, simulacra, souvenirs and secrets. They are objects we recall with intense nostalgia but also bodies we dismember and destroy. They might be made of cornhusks, clay, rags, paper, cloth, wood, porcelain, celluloid, bisque, plastic, or metal. For centuries, dolls have taught us how to understand our world and are windows to other worlds. Dolls are portals to our pasts and to ourselves. Dolls open the doors to our imagination. (from the Introduction, by Nicole Cooley)

The Doll Collection, the first anthology to focus on dolls, includes 88 poems by such poets as Michael Waters, Cecilia Woloch, Alice Friman, Lee Upton, Chana Bloch, Kelly Cherry, and Jeffrey Harrison.

Editors Jason Lee Brown and Shanie Latham selected fifty-four poems by fifty-one poets, happily including Denise Duhamel, Jack Bedell, Mira Rosenthal, Martha Silano, Julian Stannard, Charles Harper Webb, and others. With all poets singing together, we have a rainbow of words—alive, nourishing, rich—that clearly define the range and power of the once humble doughnut. Poetry and confection make for a delicious marriage. And who knew we’d live to see sugar, fat, and dough connected to the divine?

           —Grace Cavalieri, Introduction

Open this book at random and find a trove of thrilling images and unexpected metaphors: tiny bells jingling like sins, “a cool lake of indifference,” “an impossible wheel of hunger.” Read this book beginning to end and discover a dark trajectory, the work required to integrate one’s family of origin with a wider consciousness and responsibility. As have those in Geraldine Connolly’s previous books, these poems fly. But equipped with the acute sensitivity of an aileron, they fly higher and more daringly—exposing for us our own “beating heart, its thump and clamor.” This is the work of a gifted poet at the height of her powers.   —Natasha Sajé

Sarah Wetzel’s vulnerable and intimate lyrical gestures inhabit the delicate space between this world and the world to come, between one century, one moment, and the next. Their verbs gather ghostly bodies in Rome and Tuscany, in Georgia and New York; every object they encounter becomes a sacred door. This is a memoir of a woman who moves through art as through the world, who moves through the world as through an ever changeful museum of art. She demonstrates again and again that we are never alone, even after deaths and divorce, even before the mirror of our most radiantly broken self.

—Marcela Sulak