The Rusted City (Marie Alexander Poetry Series, 18) - Softcover

Hurt, Rochelle

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1935210521 ISBN 13: 9781935210528

Publisher: White Pine Press, 2014

Synopsis

"In Hurt's breathtaking mixed work of prose poetry and verse, a history of place is caked in a 'deep layer of red dust.' The Rust Belt's rattling structures and sutured-up asphalt roads are palpable here in every musical sentence."--Oliver de la Paz

"In Hurt's sparkling debut, the tinny, melancholic, gorgeous stir of Baudelaire's heartbroken metropolis is heard again, but this time its flesh and spirit are rusted. Hurt brings the prose poem back to life."--Sabrina Orah Mark

Rochelle Hurt was forged from iron ore in the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio. Currently, she lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and teaches online courses for the Loft Literary Center. 

About this title

About the Author

Rochelle Hurt was forged from iron ore in the steel mills of Youngstown, Ohio. She holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina Wilmington, and she has been awarded several poetry prizes, including the 2013 Richard Peterson Prize from Crab Orchard Review, the 2011 Rumi Prize from Arts & Letters, the 2011 Ruth Stone Poetry Prize from Hunger Mountain, and the 2010 Poetry International Prize. Her work has also been published in Best New Poets 2013, Mid-American Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. Currently, Rochelle lives in Cincinnati, Ohio, and teaches online courses for the Loft Literary Center. 

From the Back Cover

"The Rust Belt Gothic is a new political-aesthetic category, wherein the ignored or statistical pain of the nation's abandoned industrial heart is made to glow with a Poe-like anti-vigor, an undead (but unnatural) force. Rochelle Hurt's Youngstown is rife with fairy-tale inmates--a smallest sister, a favorite father, a quiet mother--yet the ruling spirits of the place are not humans but the corpsey avatars of place itself--the shuttered factory, the ruined ballroom, the big hungry plural baby of 'the century' with its singular familiar, Rust. Rust paints its red sigil everywhere, blurring the inside and outside of bodies, homes, the city itself, which eventually, like a body, must split open to expose its red and rusty heart. This is a gory, half-delirious business, wonder- and grief-stricken, urgent and exacting, tender and hot, like an iron filing shifting in the palm."
--Joyelle McSweeney

"In Rochelle Hurt's breathtaking mixed work of prose poetry and verse, a history of place is caked in a 'deep layer of red dust.' The Rust Belt's rattling structures and sutured-up asphalt roads are palpable here in every syncopated line and every musical sentence--in the flash of a worker's lunch pail and in each drink stirred by a rusty nail that leaves 'iron orange streaks' on readers' tongues. And we know that this too is the taste of our blood. We know that in the broken heart of a country, what beats is the familiar pulse of a mother, a father, and siblings, slowly hammering scraps to hold family together. We know, from this new century, that it is art like this that endures."
--Oliver de la Paz

"As moving as it is formally innovative, Rochelle Hurt's The Rusted City is an elegy for the Midwest rust belt, and for a history that is not yet even past--and also the gorgeous tale of a family told through the eyes of its smallest daughter, who greets her rusted world with every magic word of childhood, all the serious play and terrifying loves of her youth."
--Matt Bell

Edition details

• Publisher: White Pine Press
• Publication date: 2014
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1935210521
• ISBN 13: 9781935210528
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 108