Baptism of Desire - Hardcover

Erdrich, Louise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0060162139 ISBN 13: 9780060162139

Publisher: Harper & Row, 1989

Synopsis

Poems feature an assortment of saints and sinners trying to impose an acceptable reality on the world's chaos, as they seek the grace achieved through effort

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 Publishers Weekly:

Evocative and explicit, this collection of poems from novelist Erdrich ( Love Medicine ; Tracks )--whose first published volume, Jacklight , was also of poetry--explores the often mingled spiritualities of her dual Catholic and Native American heritage. First-person narrators reveal dark, intense visions in poems such as "Saint Clare," whose speaker tells of the "furnace of mirrors, / in which I watch myself burn. / The scales of my old body melt away like coins . . . ." Other poems connect to modern images and icons: the sad, surmised secret of a dull, heavy girl named Clare who paid for carnival rides "where the wild grass spread too long." The lengthy "Hydra" strings images of female sexuality, birth and mothering across time and various cultures in "plenary motion." The last poems are domestic and reflective, written, according to the author, in the small hours of the night when pregnancy made her insomniac. Vividly physiological, these celebrate the possibilities of new life against the backdrop of myth and history evoked in the preceding selections. The best poems, whose persona seems closest to the author, confirm the authority of Erdrich's voice.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper & Row
• Publication date: 1989
• ISBN 10: 0060162139
• ISBN 13: 9780060162139
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 78