New Poets of America – serie

In An Unkindness of Ravens, Meg Kearney's poems weave voices of estrangement and redemption: mothers, daughters, lovers of gin, and dead things.

In an attempt to create an identity—to imagine a past when all biological and genealogical ties have been severed—Kearney's poems create their own mythology in order to tell an emotional truth. A number of poems find the protagonist speaking to the character, Raven, who serves as an imaginary lover, friend, and foe: the vehicle through which the reader identifies with the speaker's joy and angst.

A bemused, stoop-shouldered figure who is more than a mere speaker—let’s call him a protagonist—stalks the poems of Falling to Earth. With candor and an almost grandiose simplicity, Hansen describes the limitations of his middle-aged body and, in so doing, the limitations of his enterprise in mid-life: the gracelessness of survival. Falling to Earth is the journey of a vibrant soul refreshing itself poem by poem.—Molly Peacock, from her foreword

Tom Hansen taught writing and literature for 35 years before retiring to the Black Hills of South Dakota. His credits include Paris Review, The Iowa Review, and The American Scholar.

“Memory and its embodiment in a colloquial, yet highly wrought musical language are what originally drew me to Harrington’s manuscript and what continues to pull me back. We learn the story of Lillian and Webster and their children and grandchildren, a black family living a hardscrabble life in the rural South more than sixty years ago. Set on the cusp of the Civil Rights era, the poems chronicle a way of life that has long since vanished.”—Elizabeth Spires, from the foreword

Janice N. Harrington is an award-winning children’s book author and a nationally recognized storyteller. She works as a librarian in Champaign, Illinois.