The Year of No Mistakes - Softcover

Aptowicz, Cristin O'keefe

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1938912349 ISBN 13: 9781938912344

Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing, 2013

Synopsis

Intimate, observant, and unflinchingly honest, The Year of No Mistakes is Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's tribute to the broken heart. Her sixth poetry collection chronicles the author's life as she leaves New York City, her home of fourteen years, and bears witness to the unraveling of Aptowicz's decade-long relationship. Along the way, she explores love, nostalgia, grief, desire, envy and hope in poems that showcase her emblematic funny and heartbreaking style. Stripped down and open, this collection continues Aptowicz's tradition of engaging and autobiographical work with new favorites like "Op Ed for the Sad Sack Review," "Not Doing Something Wrong isn't the Same as Doing Something Right," and "December." For a poet already known for her honesty, The Year of No Mistakes shines with beautiful vulnerability. It is a brave triumph that will push even the most stubbornly busted heart back into the light.

About this title

About the Author:

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is an American poet and a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Poetry. She is the author of five books of poetry, including the recently released Everything is Everthing (Write Bloody Publishing), as well as the canonical slam history, Words in Your Face: A Guided Tour Through Twenty Years of the New York City Poetry Slam (Soft Skull Press), which U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins wrote "leaves no doubt that the slam poetry scene has achieved legitimacy and taken its rightful place on the map of contemporary literature." Recent awards include the 2010-2011 ArtsEdge Writer-in-Residency at the University of Pennsylvania and the 2013 Amy Clampitt Residence. She lives in Austin, TX.

Review:

In The Year of No Mistakes, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz writes poetry with a stark honesty that comes along with having to rebuild a life. Her personal heartbreak lumbers off the pages and acquaints itself with the reader. But Aptowicz also touchingly adds humor and grace... You will laugh, you will cry, you will smile knowingly. Even if you don't regularly read poetry, Aptowicz's writing style is so approachable, her topics so familiar, that by the end of The Year of No Mistakes you will feel like she is your roommate, or at the very least, one of your favorite Facebook friends." -BookSlut

If you aren't familiar with Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, then you are doing a serious disservice to your sensibilities. I enjoy her work because it best captures what draws me to poetry: the expression of deep emotion and transformative experience that is never condescending, never beholden to obscurity, never tries to be anything more than a beautifully expressed sentiment that can provoke a smile, a laugh, a sadness, and at its best, a recognition and a resonance. In this book, Aptowicz has made herself vulnerable so that her audience can be transformed by them as she has." -Hothouse Magazine

"Being a poetry aficionado is not a prerequisite to loving The Year of No Mistakes. Aptowicz makes it easy to relate with her while still challenging readers to marinate on the images and ideas she presents. Throughout the whole of the book, she keenly describes the warm nostalgias for the beginnings of her long-standing relationship and the stages of grief after having lost it, as well as the vividness of her time in New York City and the woes of unemployment. No doubt this book will aid and lift broken, struggling hearts everywhere." -The Printed Whim: A Literary Journal

Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz's sixth book, The Year of No Mistakes, is a book of transitions. Movement is a strong thread throughout the most sophisticated offering this poet has made to date. Her voice is authentic and precise. The whole of the text seems as if not only the poems are in transition, but the poet as well, as if the narrator is searching for wholeness by leaving parts of herself behind... This book is a healing experience for the reader, proving that Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz is at the height of her poetic powers. -- PANK Magazine

This book of poems was written after the poet's really bad break-up. Whether you're going through a break-up with a person, with cheese, or with a job, you know what it feels like. It hurts all over. You can't think about anything else. The Year of No Mistakes is about a woman who is picking up the pieces, and it's perfect because it's what we do when things fall apart, or even when they're just temporarily messed up. -- Bustle

About this edition

• Publisher: Write Bloody Publishing
• Publication date: 2013
• ISBN 10: 1938912349
• ISBN 13: 9781938912344
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 100