Live from the Homesick Jamboree (Wesleyan Poetry Series) - Hardcover

Blevins, Adrian

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0819569305 ISBN 13: 9780819569301

Publisher: Wesleyan University Press, 2009

Synopsis

Live from the Homesick Jamboree is a brave, brash, funny, and tragic hue and cry on growing up female during the 1970s, "when everything was always so awash" that the speaker finds herself adrift among adults who act like children. The book moves from adolescence through a dry-eyed, poignant exploration of two marriages, motherhood, and the larger world, with the headlong perceptiveness and brio characteristic of Adrian Blevins's work. This poetry is plainspoken and streetwise, brutal and beautiful, provocative and self-incriminating, with much musicality and a corrosive bravura, brilliantly complicated by bursts of vernacular language and flashes of compassion. Whether listening to Emmylou Harris while thinking she should be memorizing Tolstoy, reflecting on her "full-to-bursting motherliness," aging body, the tensions and lurchings of a relationship, or "the cockamamie lovingness" of it all, the language flies fast and furious. As the poet Tony Hoagland wrote of Blevins's previous book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, "this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang."

About this title

About the Author

ADRIAN BLEVINS won the 2004 Kate Tufts Discovery Award for The Brass Girl Brouhaha (2003), and is also the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writer's Foundation Award, a Bright Hill Press Chapbook Award for The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes (1996), and the Lamar York Prize for Nonfiction. She teaches at Colby College.

Review

"This book is rich with words from every register, and they are roughed-up and sand-papered and worshipped and flung. The AC/DC-ness of them is nothing if not a mirror of what it is to live―which is awfully like what it is to love." ―Ellen Doré Watson, author of This Sharpening

"Adrian Blevins is a transcendent poet of the family in all its discontent and turbulence. Hers is a world of crush and gorge. And that gorge is deep and beautiful, but there's always a party brewing on the cliffs and dancing to be done on its crumbling edges, swords to be unsheathed, and words like stars to lasso and spin into her glittering lines." ―Barbara Hamby, author of Babel

Edition details

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0819569305
• ISBN 13: 9780819569301
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 68