Spectacle

Distributed on behalf of Panhandler Books, an imprint of the Department of English and World Languages at the University of West Florida

In Spectacle, Lauren Goodwin Slaughter’s second full-length collection, the poet deepens her commitment to the enduring and eternal subjects of womanhood, motherhood, and family, and deftly considers how those devotions intersect in ways joyful, mysterious, and cruel within personal and political landscapes. Slaughter’s poems seek out and explore authentic, raw humanity, at times employing the gaze of Dutch photographer and artist, Rineke Dijkstra—several of whose photographic portraits are included in the collection alongside ekphrastic poems—as a lens to view what Dijkstra calls the “uninhibited moment.” When artistic eye meets the fierceness of subject, the result is poetry deeply rooted in its lyricism and empathy, grounded in its depth of emotion, and unflinching in its alertness to the poet’s beloveds and world.

Lauren Goodwin Slaughter is a NEA Fellow in Poetry, the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and author of the poetry collection, a lesson in smallness. Her poems, essays, and short stories appear in Image, Harvard Review, Tupelo Quarterly, Pleiades, Kenyon Review Online, and 32 Poems, among other places. She is an associate professor of English at The University of Alabama at Birmingham where she is also Editor-in-Chief of NELLE, a literary journal that publishes writing by women.