Baptism of Desire: Poems - Softcover

Erdrich, Louise

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060920440 ISBN 13: 9780060920449

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 1990

Synopsis

A second book of poetry by Louise Erdich, author of the bestselling and award winning novels Love Medicine, The Beet Queen and Tracks.

Baptisim by blood, water, or desire is necessary for salvation in Roman Catholic tradition, and baptism of desire in the term used for the leap of trust by which a sincere believer can experience spiritual regeneration.Louise Erdrich's poems are acts of redemption. Everywhere evident is Erdrich's unique capacity for finding the perfect word, the fresh, yet absolutely right, metaphor that makes her wrk both profound and accessable.

About this title

About the Author:

Louise Erdrich is the author of fifteen novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, short stories, and a memoir of early motherhood. Her novel The Round House won the National Book Award for Fiction. The Plague of Doves won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and her debut novel, Love Medicine, was the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Erdrich has received the Library of Congress Prize in American Fiction, the prestigious PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. She lives in Minnesota with her daughters and is the owner of Birchbark Books, a small independent bookstore.

From Library Journal:

This rich book will attract Erdrich fans. Like Jacklight ( LJ 2/1/84), her first book of poems, it has tales of Potchikoo, a Chippewa Trickster, and of Mary Kroger, a butcher's wife. In the complex and masterful "Hydra," a poem written during pregnancy, Erdrich addresses both the mythical serpent and her unborn child--"Blessed one, beating your tail across heaven,/ uncoiling through the length of my life"--and compares herself to both Mary and Eve. Writing "Snake of hard hours, you are my poetry," she concludes, like Eve, that its place is "at my ear." As in a sequence on saints and sacraments, Erdrich here appropriates and transforms the Catholic theology learned as a child. A graceful, deeply metaphoric sequence on gardening, childrearing, and marriage concludes the book. Highly recommended.
- Kathleen Norris, Lemmon
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0060920440
• ISBN 13: 9780060920449
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96