Grass Whistle - Softcover

Dryansky, Amy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1908836415 ISBN 13: 9781908836410

Publisher: Salmon Poetry, 2013

Synopsis

Winner of the Massachusetts Book Award in Poetry, 2014. In her second collection of poems, Dryansky's intrepid speaker sets off once again, this time into the deceptively open field of adult life. Along the way she pushes at the boundaries of identity and connection, questioning our perceptions of selfhood and motherhood, marriage and relationships, fidelity and faith. These poems have a sense of humor; they play with language and meaning, but the questions they ask are serious: what do we want to be when we grow up? How will we know when we get there?

About this title

Review

Dryansky never fails to bespeak the "preeminence of the body" nor to remember "the brain is wider than the sky." Thus here, before you, in your hands are judicious poems that reconcile the spiritual freedom of your spine and the presiding restraint at the doorstep of your brainstem.  In this dance is a lyricism that feels gorgeously fresh: present always is a transported music and a deft eye that makes her poems, like that from the best of poets, feel sponsored by all of the natural world which she renders as exquisitely as she does her own life.  --Major Jackson

These bouncy meditations about the world "of inwardness and awkwardness" remind us that there are some things poetry gives us that other forms of writing can't. And yes it's intimacy I'm speaking of here, and the primacy of the individual's experience as she witnesses everything from a collective wind "singing in the mouths of birds" to the clear plastic tape on each six-pack of Fruit of the Loom.  Read this book.  It will make you feel better about your species. --Adrian Blevins

Edition details

• Publisher: Salmon Poetry
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1908836415
• ISBN 13: 9781908836410
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 70