Beautiful Trouble (Crab Orchard Series in Poetry) - Softcover

Amy Fleury

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0809325985 ISBN 13: 9780809325986

Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004

Synopsis

In her first collection of poems, Kansas native Amy Fleury captures images of dragging clotheslines, baked lawns, and sweet potato babies, inserting them with an earnest dignity into her stories of midwestern life. Beautiful Trouble explores the subtleties of landscape, place, families, girlhood, womanhood, and everyday existence on the prairie. Fleury writes of the Midwest with authenticity, speaks of romance with delicate allure, and recalls the heartbreak of childhood without self-pity. In meditations on resilience and life’s contradictions, Fleury engages her characters fully and paints their souls and sensations evenly in language both rare and beautiful. She is a poet in love with sound and its power to summon majesty from quotidian scenes. Her poems are brief and striking, depending on exquisite word choice and balance to achieve a simple order on the page.

About this title

About the Author

A native of rural northeast Kansas, Amy Fleury earned an M.F.A. from McNeese State University and has held the Nadya Aisenberg Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony. Her poetry and fiction have appeared in numerous journals, including Southern Poetry Review, North American Review, 21st, Laurel Review, South Dakota Review, and Prairie Schooner. She is an associate professor of English at Washburn University and the managing editor of Woodley Memorial Press in Topeka, Kansas.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

At Twenty-Eight

It seems I get by on more luck than sense,
not the kind brought on by knuckle to wood,
breath on dice or pennies found in the mud.
I shimmy and slip by on pure fool chance.
At turns, charmed and cursed, a girl knows romance
as coffee, red wine, and books; solitude
she counts as daylight virtue and muted
evenings, the inventory of absence.
But this is no sorry spinster story,
just the way days string together a life.
Sometimes I eat soup right out of the pan.

Sometimes I don t care if I will marry.
I dance in my kitchen on Friday nights,
singing like only a lucky girl can.

Edition details

• Publisher: Southern Illinois University Press
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0809325985
• ISBN 13: 9780809325986
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 64