Singing Back to the Sirens - Softcover

DeRitter, Margaret

Softcover

ISBN 10: 195073028X ISBN 13: 9781950730285

Publisher: Unsolicited Press, 2019

Synopsis

Singing Back to the Sirens explores the many ways that desire and love, loss and grief, can shape a woman's life. The poems in this two-part collection look at the loneliness of a newborn for her sick mother, the first stirrings of sexual desire for a best friend, the treacherous leap from a sheltered world of faith into lesbian life, the frustrations of falling for straight women, the alchemy of falling in love, the aftermath of losing it. In the first section, the poet sings back to the many women she has loved. In the second, she sings back to the one who sang the sweetest and the saddest songs.

About this title

About the Author

Margaret DeRitter is the poetry editor and copy editor of Encore, a regional magazine based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was a winner of the 2018 Celery City Chapbook Contest, sponsored by Kalamazoo's Friends of Poetry, for her chapbook Fly Me to Heaven By Way of New Jersey. Her writing has appeared in the anthologies Surprised By Joy (Wising Up Press) and Queer Around the World (Qommunicate Publishing) and in a number of journals, including The 3288 Review, which nominated her poem "At the top of Sleeping Bear Dunes" for a Pushcart Prize. DeRitter has also written numerous magazine and newspaper articles. She worked for 22 years at the Kalamazoo Gazette and has taught journalism at Western Michigan University and Kalamazoo College. She was born and raised in New Jersey and has lived in Michigan since college. When not writing or editing, she often paddles Michigan lakes and rivers.

Review

"Taken together, these achingly beautiful and gutsy poems represent an autobiography of love, from early crushes to coming out to a Calvinist mother in a New Jersey landscape and its sea-salt air to the speaker's erotic coming-of-age--first gay bar, first girlfriend--and finally adult love and marriage, and the marriage's startling dissolution against the mucky inland lakes and icy realms of Michigan. This collection is unflinching, honest, and spare in its insistent descriptions of grief's volatility and its silences. DeRitter never bails us out, never shuts the tap on the speaker's heroic, lavish yearning."

-- Diane Seuss, author of Four-Legged Girl (finalist for Pulitzer Prize in Poetry) and Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl

Edition details

• Publisher: Unsolicited Press
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 195073028X
• ISBN 13: 9781950730285
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 100