Blue Etiquette - Softcover

Driskell, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 159709238X ISBN 13: 9781597092388

Publisher: Red Hen Press, 2016

Synopsis

When Kathleen Driskell pulled an old edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette from the used bookstore shelf and blew dust off the blue linen cover, she instantly found herself and her family within those pages―not as the Worldlys, Oldlineages, or the Gildings (archetypes Post created to demonstrate how to properly manage a grand house full of servants), but as the housemaids, cooks, and useful men working for those very rich. The noted poet―whose collection Seed Across Snow was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation―explores class, the workplace, and those tense interactions between the haves and the have nots in her new collection. As America watches its middle-class quickly decline, Blue Etiquette rings with relevance.

About this title

About the Author:

Kathleen Driskell is the author of three previously published poetry collections including Next Door to the Dead and Seed Across Snow, listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation, and she is professor of creative writing and a director of Spalding University’s low-residency MFA program in Louisville, Kentucky.

Review:

“In Blue Etiquette Kathleen Driskell has drawn back the curtain on the gracious, if not always the good, members of polite society and shown us the hazards to those in service who do not attend carefully to protocol. From Emily Post’s 1922 Etiquette, she has recovered rules for survival in a world where distinctions between the classes are sharp as the razor’s edge of a bone-handled fruit knife, polished to gleaming for ‘its own strange work.’ Violating the commandment that ‘what we see, we rarely ever say,’ she bears witness to those whose job it is to keep silent―country club groundskeeper, head waiter's assistant, nursing home aid, laundry woman. In narratives of service and suffering, Driskell gives us poetry that sings like silver, bright and dark in its rich patina.”

―Lynnell Edwards, author of Covet

“Blue Etiquette simmers with discord between constraint and escape, creating an ambience of domestic complexity à la Mad Men away from the firm―‘cigarette smoldered in the pink melamine ashtray’―capturing and deconstructing not only a period, but a worldview. Driskell acknowledges the light generated by moments of subtle grace, but also grapples with the nuanced darkness that accompanies such instants. Blue Etiquette is a coming to terms, in the face of complicated and sometimes raw-nerved lives, with what, if any, transcendent verity might be perceived between private life and decorum.”

―Adam Day, author of Model of a City in Civil War, selected for The Linda Bruckheimer Series in Kentucky Literature, Sarabande Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Red Hen Press
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 159709238X
• ISBN 13: 9781597092388
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120