Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Protection Spell
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S): Givhan, Jennifer Casas Boese
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://jennifergivhan.com/
CITY:
STATE: NM
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://jennifergivhan.com/12-2/ * https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jennifer-givhan
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: no2016134805
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/no2016134805
HEADING: Givhan, Jennifer
000 00859cz a2200193n 450
001 10278040
005 20170612105434.0
008 161006n| azannaabn |n aaa c
010 __ |a no2016134805
035 __ |a (OCoLC)oca10599696
040 __ |a IdU |b eng |e rda |c IdU |d DLC
046 __ |s 20
053 _0 |a PS3607.I78
100 1_ |a Givhan, Jennifer
370 __ |c United States |2 naf
374 __ |a Poets |2 lcsh
375 __ |a Females |2 lcdgt
377 __ |a eng
670 __ |a Givhan, Jennifer. Landscape with headless mama, 2016: |b title page (Jennifer Givhan) page [86] (Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican American poet who grew up in the Imperial Valley in Southern California. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and an MA in English Literature at California State University, Fullerton. Her writing has appeared widely in literary journals and anthologies.)
PERSONAL
Children: two.
EDUCATION:Warren Wilson College, M.F.A.; California State University, Fullerton, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer. Poetry Barn, instructor; Tinderbox Poetry Journal, poetry editor.
AWARDS:Second place, DASH Poetry Prize; second place, Blue Mesa Review Poetry Prize; Pleiades Editors’ Prize, 2015, for Landscape with Headless Mama; Lascaux Review Editors’ Choice Poetry Prize, 2015; Pinch Poetry Prize; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 2015; PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship; Greg Grummer Poetry Prize, 2017.
WRITINGS
Contributor to anthologies, including Best New Poets 2013 and Best of the Net 2015. Contributor to periodicals, including AGNI, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, Poetry, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, Kenyon Review, and Indiana Review.
SIDELIGHTS
Jennifer Givhan is the author of the poetry collections Landscape with Headless Mama and Protection Spell. The latter volume explores family and identity, touching on the author’s mixed-race husband and her Mexican-American background. Other poems in the collection explore the poet’s children. One of the author’s children is adopted, and poems in the book comment on this aspect of identity as well. From the racism Givhan encounters on a daily basis to more egregious (if more rare) instances, Givhan comments on the complicated realities of raising a mixed-race family. The desire to protect herself and her family drives many of the poems in the book, thus inspiring and feeling the collection’s title. By asking readers to bear witness to the injustices portrayed in these poems, Givhan hopes to cast a protection spell over herself, her family, and anyone in need of witness and protection.
The poet noted in an interview posted on the website for the M.F.A. Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College: “The collection comes from empathy and witness, from standing up and proclaiming boldly and without fear what I see and feel. Repetition and rhythm are built into the energy of the book because it comes from a place of righteous, incredulous anger. Of being tired enough to say enough. Repetition is a major structural element in the book because the poems take on the oral tradition of speaking out grievances, of praying and chanting, of two or more gathered, of calling out—I read my poems aloud, often when I write, and sway back and forth rhythmically as I type the poems on the keyboard, the same as when I read the poems aloud (to audiences).” Givhan went on to state: “These poems move through my body and come from the body and are about the body—those bodies of color, gendered bodies, sexualized and degraded bodies that need protection, that have always needed protection. This is a book of righting wrongs for myself, my family, my people. The poems bear witness again and again—because it’s been necessary to tell our stories again and again.”
Reviewers largely praised Protection Spell, noting that the collection features surreal imagery and interesting line breaks. For instance, a Publishers Weekly Online correspondent announced that “every line is tightly composed, and the sensory details pull the reader towards the poet as she recounts her splintered world.” José Angel Araguz, writing on the Bind website, was also impressed, and he announced: “Whether it is standing one’s ground regarding family … or empathizing with and speaking in the voices of figures past and present who have survived physical and cultural violence, the poems in this collection are alive with the complexity of wanting to protect while needing to be protected as well. These are poems that engage human experience beyond the binary of aggression and passivity, and reflect a world where the two sides blur.” Offering further applause in the online Crab Fat magazine, Heidi Czerwiec declared: “In Protection Spell, race and racism are the dark matter that may have been invented by scientists, but which nonetheless influence Americans’ actions. It manifests its power in this collection in how the mixed-race Latina-American poet is treated as a girl, her mixed-race marriage, the family they assemble, and their fraught interactions with each other and the world.” Czerwiec went on to conclude that “Givhan uses everything at her disposal—prayers, spells, dreams, mythic evocations.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, January 16, 2017, review of Protection Spell, p. 38.
ONLINE
Bind, https://www.thebind.net/ (July 6, 2017), José Angel Araguz, review of Protection Spell.
Crab Fat, http://crabfatmagazine.com (October 18, 2017), Heidi Czerwiec, review of Protection Spell.
Jennifer Givhan Website, https://jennifergivhan.com (October 18, 2017).
Warren Wilson College, M.F.A. Program for Writers Website, http://www.wwcmfa.org/ (October 18, 2017), author profile.*
Jennifer Givhan, Poet & Novelist
Landscape with Headless Mama
HomeAbout my poetryAbout the authorContact Jenn / Buy a BookManuscript CritiquesMother Writers’ Series Poems, Stories, and Critical WorkReadings Fall 17 & Spring 18
About the author
Jenn's book collage revised (2)
(Jennifer Casas Boese Givhan)
I am a Mexican-American poet who grew up in the Imperial Valley, a small, border community in the Southern California desert. My family has ties to the Laguna Pueblo in West-Central New Mexico. I earned my MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College in North Carolina and my Master’s in English LiteratureJenn at her desk at California State University Fullerton, where I was the recipient of the Graduate Equity Fellowship. My honors include a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, The 2017 Greg Grummer Poetry Prize chosen by Monica Youn, The 2015 Lascaux Review Editors’ Choice Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize chosen by Ada Limón, The DASH Poetry Prize, 2nd Place in Blue Mesa Review’s 2014 Poetry Prize, and my work has been nominated four times for a Pushcart. I have appeared or am forthcoming in Best of the Net 2015, Best New Poets 2013, AGNI, TriQuarterly, Ploughshares, POETRY, Boston Review, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, The Kenyon Review, Rattle (2015 Poetry Prize finalist), Prairie Schooner, Columbia Poetry Journal, Indiana Review (runner up for the 2015 Poetry Prize), and Southern Humanities Review (finalist for the 2015 Auburn Witness Prize), among over a hundred other publications.
I write, teach online poetry workshops at The Poetry Barn, work as Poetry Editor at Tinderbox Poetry Journal, and raise two young children with my family in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Here’s an interview with Indiana Review, where I was the 2015 Poetry Prize Runner-Up (I talk about WIC, poetry contests as pig-auctions, Jewel & Destiny’s child, & sticky motherlove).
Here’s my Art Talk with the NEA in which I discuss poetry as x-ray vision & why the arts matter.
Here’s an interview with The Review Review about LANDSCAPE WITH HEADLESS MAMA, compiling a first poetry collection, submission advice, and more. “Write your truths, hone your craft, & don’t give up!”
***My poetry collection Landscape with Headless Mama has won the 2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize and is forthcoming in 2016!***
About my book, Patricia Smith writes, “Pardon me, but I’m shivering a bit at my core. These are restless, storm-hued stanzas, revelations of our dark cravings and hapless, woefully imperfect attempts at perfect love. Here are the dreams even our dreams won’t reveal, flaunting wild edges and endings that nudge the soul, each fusing of lyric and lesson as potent as a backhand slap. And Mama watches everything. Mama sees it all.”
Rigoberto González says, “What’s living without fear of getting lost?” That’s only one of many empowering moments in Jennifer Givhan’s auspicious debut. Her “blood magic” ink delivers the hard truths that kick-start the healing of the “splintered cactus” that hurdles the path of a woman’s journey. Landscape with Headless Mama blossoms with the “strange alloys of sadness” that devastate motherhood and femininity, and then nurture their wounds back to vibrant life.
Van Jordan says, “In Jennifer Givhan’s Landscape with Headless Mama, the vivid truth of these poems evokes both the wince of pain and the head-rush of joy, the familial and the romantic disconnections we endure and those connections found in the same terrain that we, still, manage to cherish. If there’s a line in these poems that doesn’t surprise, I couldn’t find it; one never knows where the poem will take us. I found myself tracing “maps of the borderland into my body/ cliff dwelling, the taste of red brick on the tongue….” Each figure rendered, each voice conjured comes to life with their distinct journey, and Givhan continues to remind us of yet another truth: “There are other ways for the story to end.” Indeed, the possibilities seem limitless in this world she builds. If a collection of poems can be called a page-turner, this is what it feels like.”
The collection is a surreal survival guide that views motherhood and the speaker’s relationships (with her own mother, children, and partner) through the lens of hereditary mental illness and cultural and familial myths. Its framework is inspired by the artwork of Frida Kahlo, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington, three Mexican surrealist women whose work and lives have been incredibly inspiring and buttressing to my sense of myself as an artist. The collection centers on a speaker who is reliving her childhood with a mentally ill mother, and who is struggling with mental illness as she raises her own children–the poems often turn to surrealism, magical realism, art, and myth as the speaker searches for hope, forgiveness, and transcendence. (It has also been a 2014 Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist and a 2014 Prairie Schooner Book Prize finalist).
****My second book Protection Spell has been chosen by Billy Collins (former U.S. Poet Laureate) for inclusion in The Miller Williams Series and will be published in February 2017 with University of Arkansas Press!****
Protection Spell explores racial inequalities in our current social landscape. It asks what it means to be safe and how we can create safe spaces through the traumas of racism, violence, gendered abuse, mental illness, and even ordinary, everyday sadnesses. In the early summer on a balcony in Squaw Valley, I watched the morning light across the pines in the distance and thought about the lives lost in the last year to ingrained racist norms and the shattering of homes when the police come bearing the news to families. A bedrock poem in the collection, “The Glance” (finalist for Rattle’s 2015 Poetry Prize), is based on a very real trauma inside my own biracial home. The collection is a reassembling of that home, a piecing together. In the poem, the speaker’s black husband is accused of a crime he did not commit, and the speaker is forced to shut the blinds to the outside world to protect her family. The truth is that my family shut the blinds, and, for a long while, I shut my heart in self-defense. But it has torn open. This collection is a tearing open. Protection Spell, which acts as witness to social trauma from the many standpoints afforded by a passably white enough brown mother-woman to stand in the divide and speak out.
***
My current writing project is a novel titled JUBILEE, where “Lars and the Real Girl” and “The Velveteen Rabbit” meet motherhood. It is a darkly surreal tale of trauma, survival, and redemption.
I’m also sending out another new full-length poetry collections to publishers:
Einstein’s Imaginary Daughters re-imagines the life of Lieserl, daughter whom Einstein and his wife Mileva allegedly gave up for adoption at birth—a story that resonates with my own, and which I tell through a Latin@/desert-borderland perspective. Utilizing details from Einstein’s known life and quantum physics, I’ve imagined Lieserl in the desert in a circus-like landscape of childhood trauma and survival guided by my protagonist Rosa and her sister Nieve, Latin@ revisions of the fairytale Rose Red and Snow White. Albert Einstein wrote, “All religions, arts, and sciences are branches of the same tree.” I’m exploring where art and science intersect, and in that process using poetry to debunk the idea that science is incompatible with myth, that it replaces myth. Carl Sagan wrote “it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring”—yet I have found intersections, borderlands between myth and science. Through my poetry in Einstein’s Imaginary Daughters, I theorize a link between the imagination and reality: we call into being our realities from the realm of the imagination, supported by Platonic ideas of the cave of shadows and the existential idea that we experience the world through our senses and so all external reality is already filtered through our consciousness and sensory perceptions.
JennMy first full-length poetry collection Red Sun Mother, which focuses on themes of infertility, adoption, and motherhood, was nominated a finalist in the 2012 Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways Poetry Prize and the 2011 St. Lawrence Book Award Contest through Black Lawrence Press.
048
The book examines cultural constructions of and attitudes toward the “barren” woman as she emerges in Mexican and Mexican-American literature. Moreover, it re-evaluates/revises the symbolic mythology surrounding the childless or “infertile” woman by juxtaposing her with differing cultural models of Mexican motherhood in order to include her story with the other madres mujeres of literature.
My husband Andrew and I adopted our beautiful baby son in 2007, and I gave birth to our strong, healthy daughter in August 2010.
grampy glassesHere’s an interview and four poems up at Connotation Press.
Here, my amiga, writer Dini Karasik, interviews me for Origins Literary Journal:
Interview with Jennifer Givhan on Writing
And here’s another: Interview with Poet Jennifer Givhan at the Fertile Source
Share this:
Facebook5TwitterEmailPrintReddit
6 Comments (+add yours?)
James Washington, Jr.
Mar 09, 2016 @ 16:05:36
Hi Jennifer,
I’m in and around poetry much of the time but still manage to miss some powerful voices until they turn up, as today, on a daily e-poetry distribution. I just read “The Glance” compliments of Rattle. As a friend says about food: “This tastes like more!” And so I set off in search of more and found your “an editor advised me to stop writing mother bird poems.” When I get back up from the floor, I’ll continue the trail to “more.” So nicely done! I’m better for the introduction to your work.
–Jim
REPLY
jgivhan
Mar 09, 2016 @ 16:07:56
Jim, thank you so much for this kind & generous note. It means everything to me that my work is out there & resonating with readers. My heart is full.
All the poetry love,
Jenn
REPLY
Nancy L Meyer
Mar 09, 2016 @ 20:19:07
I too astound myself with The Glance and then reading more of your work on Connotation and the interviews and now off to order your books. I wondered that you did not mention Clarissa Pinkola Estes as a border voice to read, not a poet per se but her sensibilities match yours and she speaks so powerfully to us as women.
As a white woman married for many years to a Jamaican man, with our son, I struggle to get that experience of racial intersection on the page. Brava for The Glance. I cannot wait to spend more time with your wonderful work.
REPLY
jgivhan
Mar 09, 2016 @ 21:49:29
Thank you so much for your feedback, Nancy! And I’ve loved Women Who Run With Wolves by Estés!
All best,
Jenn
REPLY
david ethan levit
Sep 12, 2016 @ 20:28:46
“the Cheerleaders” – I was very skeptical when I began reading. And as I crept further into the poem I didn’t become less so, at first. But then I felt something begin to seep in and I realized I was being drawn, led into something beautiful and painful and awful. Yes, over the course of the poem you changed my mind, and I realize, maybe you changed both our minds. wonderful discovery!
REPLY
jgivhan
Sep 12, 2016 @ 20:32:55
Thank you for this honest feedback, David. That you were drawn into what is both beautiful and painful in my poem, and in my experience, into a new discovery–that truly fills my heart. Wishing you all the poetry love and light.
All the best,
Jenn
REPLY
Leave a Reply
Enter your comment here...
Jennifer Givhan
Search...
SEARCH
Follow Blog via Email
Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.
Join 4,177 other followers
Enter your email address
Follow
Follow Jenn Givhan on Twitter
Blog at WordPress.com. •
Skip to Content
Search
Search by Poem or Poet
About Us
Events
Newsletters
Give
SUBSCRIBE
POETRY FOUNDATION
POEMS
Poems Home
Poems for Children
Poems for Teens
Poem Guides
Audio Poems
POETS
PROSE
Prose Home
Harriet Blog
COLLECTIONS
LISTEN
LEARN
Learn Home
Children
Teens
Adults
Educators
Glossary of Poetic Terms
VISIT
Visit Home
Events
Exhibitions
Library
POETRY MAGAZINE
Poetry Magazine Home
Current Issue
Poetry Magazine Archive
Subscriptions
About the Magazine
How to Submit
Advertise with Us
Jennifer Givhan
http://jennifergivhan.com
J. Andrew Givhan
Jennifer Givhan is a Mexican-American poet from the Southwestern desert. She is the author of Landscape with Headless Mama (2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize) and Protection Spell (2016 Miller Williams Series, University of Arkansas Press). Her chapbooks include Lifeline (Glass Poetry Press), The Daughter’s Curse (ELJ Editions), and Lieserl Contemplates Resurrection (dancing girl press). Her honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellowship, The Frost Place Latin@ Scholarship, The 2015 Lascaux Review Poetry Prize, The Pinch Poetry Prize, and her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Best of the Net, Best New Poets, AGNI, Ploughshares, Poetry, TriQuarterly, Crazyhorse, Blackbird, and The Kenyon Review. She lives with her family in New Mexico.
POEMS BY JENNIFER GIVHAN
Sin Vergüenza (Como los Pájaros)
MORE ABOUT THIS POET
Region:
U.S., SOUTHWESTERN
Poems by This Poet
Sin Vergüenza (Como los Pájaros)
POEMS
Poems for Children
Poems for Teens
Poem Guides
Audio Poems
POETS
PROSE
Harriet Blog
COLLECTIONS
LISTEN
LEARN
Children
Teens
Adults
Educators
Glossary of Poetic Terms
VISIT
Events
Exhibitions
Library
POETRY MAGAZINE
Current Issue
Poetry Magazine Archive
Subscriptions
About the Magazine
How to Submit
Advertise with Us
ABOUT US
Give
Foundation Awards
Media Partnerships
Poetry Out Loud
People
Jobs
Poetry Foundation Children
Poetry Magazine
CONTACT US
NEWSLETTERS
PRESS
PRIVACY POLICY
POLICIES
TERMS OF USE
POETRY MOBILE APP
61 West Superior Street, Chicago, IL 60654
Hours: Monday-Friday 11am - 4pm
© 2017 Poetry Foundation
See a problem on this page?
Skip to main content
NEA
Help us celebrate the NEA's 50th anniversary
Art Works
Search form
Search
HOMEABOUTGRANTSNEWSLIFETIME HONORSPUBLICATIONSARTISTIC FIELDSCONTACT
You are here
Home » Writer's Corner » 2015 Poetry
WRITERS' CORNER
Jennifer Givhan
2015 Poetry
Author's Statement
As a Latina poet from the California/Mexico border, I speak for the women I grew up with: the mothers, daughters, childless women, aunties, and nanas who have become my voice, my poetry, concerned with the complex relationships many Latina women have with family—both a liberating and subjugating force, buttressing and repressive, mythical and real. My own family has long supported my poetry. This fellowship means I can now afford childcare and take on fewer classes as an adjunct professor and devote more time to writing without sacrificing time away from home.
This fellowship will allow me to finish my manuscript Karaoke Night at the Asylum, which illuminates the life of a woman who relives her childhood in the Southwestern desert with a mentally ill mother, an alcoholic scientist father, and a suicidal brother, and who now struggles with mental illness as she raises her own children. In addition, the fellowship will also allow me to continue my next manuscript Aunt Lucy Packs a Suitcase, in which I re-conceive the roles of women of color as assigned by the cultures of their ancestors and their homeland, the United States. Speaking from the liminal societal space inhabited by many African-American, Mexican-American, and Native-American women, my poems deconstruct nursery rhymes, songs and chants, and often focus on repetition as a vehicle to describe the nature of loss.
Receiving the fellowship reminds me to continue sending my art out into the world, to keep writing my distinct interpretation of the lives of so many men and women, and that, yes, there is an audience for my work. I'm so thankful not only for the financial help but for the emotional and psychological encouragement this award gives me.
"Eve"
And they, since they were not the one dead, turned to their affairs. —Robert Frost
Mama was afraid her affairs would disappear
with all her small places, where the donut shop
at the town's brief edge cliff dived into the Río Grande.
We split her belongings in the end: one of us got the house,
another the car and all the furniture, and the last
her clothes and jewelry box. In its carved
cedar, I kept her ideas about why we need to believe,
the deeper cistern of her soul, the milk
of her pearls around my neck.
Now I'm turning milkfish, sufficing my way
around death's belled curve, slipstream & moon slice,
a red-chested bird on the crabapple tree
whose leaves have fallen &
all that are left appear as holly berries blinking
the rhinestones of Mama's party dresses.
Come Christmas like at All Hallow's Eve, the veil
thinnest between this world & the next, where snow
branches pray to sky, & all linearity's gone
cyclical, creating space so white it blurs the threads,
I'll be turning presence in the afterhours, the second
coming of twilight, this dress up affair flashing stay,
stay with us tonight.
(First published in Southern Humanities Review, under the title "The Inheritance")
Jennifer Givhan
Jennifer Givhan was a PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices Fellow, as well as the 2013 DASH Literary Journal Poetry Prize winner, an Andrés Montoya Poetry Prize finalist, St. Lawrence Book Award finalist, a Vernice Quebodeaux Pathways finalist, and a Prairie Schooner Book Prize finalist. She earned her MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, and her Master's in English from California State University Fullerton. Her work has appeared in over seventy literary journals and anthologies, including Best New Poets 2013, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Rattle, The Collagist, cream city review, and The Columbia Review. She raises her two young children with her family in Albuquerque, and she teaches composition at Western New Mexico University and online workshops with The Rooster Moans Poetry Cooperative. You can visit Givhan online at http://jennifergivhan.com.
Photo courtesy of Jennifer Givhan
Site MapSite PoliciesUSA.gov
Social Media Scam Regarding NEA Grants
National Endowment for the Arts 400 7th Street, SW, Washington, DC 20506 202.682.5400 | webmgr@arts.gov
The MFA Program For Writers at Warren Wilson College HOMEABOUTAPPLYSTUDENT/FACULTY ACCESSALUMNISTOREFRIENDS OF WRITERSCONTACT US
Search this site...
Submit
Home » featured2 » Interview with Graduate Fellowship and Lisel Mueller Scholarship recipient Jennifer Givhan
Interview with Graduate Fellowship and Lisel Mueller Scholarship recipient Jennifer Givhan
Posted on Sep 12, 2016
Jenn purple crabapple (resized)
Jennifer Givhan (poetry 2015) is the recipient of a Graduate Fellowship and Lisel Mueller Scholarship. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in AGNI, TriQuarterly, The Kenyon Review, Rattle (where she was a 2015 Poetry Prize finalist), Prairie Schooner, and Columbia Poetry Journal, among many others. Jennifer is a recipient of NEA and PEN/Rosenthal Emerging Voices fellowships. Her poetry collection Landscape with Headless Mama, was published in September by LSU Press, and her second collection, Protection Spell, will be published by University of Arkansas Press in February of 2017. Jennifer lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, with her family.
Your poetry collection, Landscape with Headless Mama, won the 2015 Pleiades Editors’ Prize and is out from LSU Press. Congratulations! The collection’s central speaker is a woman reliving her childhood with her mentally ill mother, and the book is, as you put it, “a surreal survival guide.” In what ways? And what is it about surrealism and magical realism that creates a compelling coping mechanism?
For a long while I didn’t even realize my poems were surreal. My favorite painters have long been Mexican surrealists (Frida, Remedios, and Leonora) and I knew their work inspired me as I daily live, breathe, write…But I didn’t know my metaphors and leaps and associations were all that strange…until I was told so. I sense that this is the survival part, somehow. And the power of surrealism. Our minds make wonderfully strange leaps when they’re protecting us. The survival part of the book is both saying the unsayable and renaming/reclaiming what’s been said (and done). Sometimes it takes seeing the (fractured) world and our place in it one or two steps to the side of reality, just that far askance, to be able to bare (and bear) reality.
How did growing up in a border community in the Southern California desert influence your work? Are there traits you’ll find in a border community you won’t find anyplace else? (Also, can you define borderland for us?)
It was hot and humid, smelled of manure and sugar beets, we choked on white flies. There was mariachi every weekend and we’d go into Calexico for the swap meet or Mexicali for clubbing because the drinking age is lower. We’d go to the rodeo, the one time a year our town was famous and cowboys from across the Southwest would come to compete. Our farming community was split—the rich white farmers who’d founded it when the Salton Sea was accidentally created from a break in dam of the Colorado River—and the Mexicans who worked the farms. We were in-between, in-flux, in a liminal space—without the resources of metropolitan America.
Borderland for me is a way of defining these liminal spaces, the unofficial, the pocho (white-washed Mexican) and Spanglish way of life that so many mixed-culture Latin@ Americans feel. The strange in-between-ness—how some phrases and ideas only come in Spanish in my mind though I don’t personally speak Spanish fluently (because my grandparents wanted their children to “fit it,” to survive—they didn’t grow up on the border but a more conventionally “American” 1950s suburb, and it was only later my family moved down to the border). So I grew up in a borderland of identity and it has defined much of how I view myself and the world around me—how I tend to notice and speak up for those caught in the cracks, the unnoticed and unsung, who are my kindred, my familia.
I now live in New Mexico, which parallels where I grew up in the Southern California desert, the mix of cultures here: the Nuevo Mexicans whose ancestors lived here when this was Mexico, and whose ancestors I come from (my great grandmother’s family is from Las Cruces); the Puebloan peoples and tribal nations whose ancestors have been here for thousands of years; and mainstream America.
All of this affects my work. Just as I didn’t know I was writing surreally, I don’t consciously need to evoke the borderland in my work—the borderland speaks through me.
In your poem, “Curanderisma,” there is a border of white space the reader has to cross to get from one stanza to the next....until the poem merges, breaks apart, and splinters again. The effect is spellbinding. In your work, you examine a range of borderlands, between motherhood and non-motherhood, the real and the surreal, and fullness and absence, for example. (And in your teaching, the borderland between fiction and poetry!) After you’ve found an interesting divide, what’s your process for bringing it to the page?
The divides for me are places of connection. The contrapuntal poem (such as “Curanderisma”—where the lines can be read both horizontally across the page and vertically down the page) allows for simultaneity, for two or more realities to exist at once (similar to surrealism/magical realism). It’s about how you’re looking, how you’re reading the spaces between. So when I find a divide, more than anything, I search for blurring—for the places the edges and boundaries are not clearly delineated. When I was not a mother, I still related with mothers. Then I adopted my baby boy and still related with birthmothers though I’d never given birth. Finally, in the infinite mystery of this Universe, I was able to carry my daughter to term, and still I relate to non-mothers. So perhaps the borderlands for me, more than anything, are about empathy.
You also write fiction! Does your prose writing happen in a phase separate from your poetry writing? Or would you work on both the lyric and the narrative in one sitting? How might they help each other?
I write whatever the Muse brings me, in whatever form it comes. Poetry is definitely the more natural operative mode for me, but some stories have come to me in prose (though my idea of prose is probably more lyrical and more closely related to poetry than most fiction writers since I tend to think in terms of snapshots, gaps, and fragments rather than the panoramic view).
I don’t often write poetry and fiction in one sitting because I find myself in a different frame of mind for each. Both require tremendous amount of feeling, of letting the unconscious take control, getting out of my own way and allowing the story or moment or memory to come through. I love Frost’s idea of the writing as ice on a hot stove riding its own melting. Both poetry and fiction come from that place of surprise, of writing to find out what I think and feel and remember—what my psyche knows and will reveal to me through my speaker(s) and characters.
But I find that I tend to think primarily in snapshots and associative logic with poetry, and that fragmentation is the dominant mode for me there, finding connections between gaps—whereas with the fiction, I need to inhabit character and think more sequentially, though I find this difficult. With fiction, the writing needs to be more fluid to make any sense (otherwise, I end up writing a passage that is truly more closely tied to prose poem than fiction). Still, either way, I need to put myself into the place, the scene—that remains important no matter what I’m writing, and sometimes I’ll return to the fiction or poetry I’ve already written as starting point, to remind myself where I’m located spatially and temporally so that I can launch into the depth of feeling and the kind of thinking (associative or sequentially) I need for the specific project I’m working on (poetry or a scene in a novel).
I’ve borrowed from myself across genres in order to begin a new day’s work—as a kind of prompt—and I recommend trying this. If you’re stuck in a scene of fiction, try writing it as poetry just for fun and see what happens, and vice versa. You can take what you’ve started and adapt it to your project, but even if it goes “nowhere” you’ll save on the page, the work you’ve done across genres will likely open new pathways for your writing.
In Landscape with Headless Mama, “dark fairy tales” are an influence. What was it like using fairy tales as a lens for poetry? Do they play well together?
I often turn to folktale and myth as a form of inspiration. I’m not certain what the technical distinctions are between folktale, fairytale, and myth—but there’s a sense for me that whatever you call this, I’m tapping into the collective unconscious, into the mystical power of story we’ve all inherited, in one sense or another. I tend to look to Latin@ folktale, such as La Llorona, and there’s a sense also of religious story as an important factor. I grew up devoutly religious, and I tend now to see what I learned as “reality” has connections to the supernatural of fairytale and myth. I’m not denying or discounting my family’s religion, and faith has served me throughout my life. But this means there’s a part of me that believes, deeply, and craves, even stronger, truth from the stories we inherit, from our culture, our mothers, the books we read, the songs we memorize, our chants and prayers. All of this to say I see poetry as a form of prayer. The folklore and ritual and stories passed orally combine for many border cultures (such as Our Lady of Guadalupe, who blurs and blends the traditional biblical Mary with indigenous folk belief). As prayer connects us, as story connects us, I believe so too does poetry.
Your second book, Protection Spell, was chosen by former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins to be included in the Miller Williams Series by University of Arkansas Press—to be published in February of 2017! Double congratulations! The collection explores, in your words, “racial inequalities in our current landscape,” and a cornerstone of the book is your poem “The Glance.” A finalist for Rattle’s 2015 Poetry Prize, this poem explores a racially motivated trauma that shook your biracial household. Repetition is deeply effective as it speaks to the shock and disbelief. Were there approaches to language and craft that you found particularly effective for this collection?
The collection comes from empathy and witness, from standing up and proclaiming boldly and without fear what I see and feel. Repetition and rhythm are built into the energy of the book because it comes from a place of righteous, incredulous anger. Of being tired enough to say enough. Repetition is a major structural element in the book because the poems take on the oral tradition of speaking out grievances, of praying and chanting, of two or more gathered, of calling out—I read my poems aloud, often when I write, and sway back and forth rhythmically as I type the poems on the keyboard, the same as when I read the poems aloud (to audiences). These poems move through my body and come from the body and are about the body—those bodies of color, gendered bodies, sexualized and degraded bodies that need protection, that have always needed protection. This is a book of righting wrongs for myself, my family, my people. The poems bear witness again and again—because it’s been necessary to tell our stories again and again.
Do you have any guidance for writers who are trying to explore the political in their own works?
The personal is political. OK—I stole this from Adrienne Rich, but I’ve held tenet deep in my heart since I learned the words from Rich in grad school (when I was reading Of Woman Born) and this is what I’ve known deep down even before I had the words to describe what it meant—when I felt the political of my body as it was used against me, and when I saw the stories of those I loved repeated and played out on larger social and political scales. So connect with the deep heart of the issues. Not the ideology or the commentary, but the people. The land. The living, breathing aspect of whatever you’re exploring. If I were to set out to write a poem about single motherhood and poverty, it might become a treatise, a rhetorical essay, a journalistic piece, not necessarily a poem or story. But when I focus on the mama in line next to me at the WIC counter, there’s the heart. She’s the heart. So my advice: find the heart. And whenever women and people of color, the LGBTQ community and the disenfranchised in our society, whenever we speak out and write our hearts—we are tapping into the political. Our writing is an act of resistance and survival. Once I learned that and stopped worrying about whether I could or should say I in my poems, once I gave myself permission to explore the lives of those I love and those whose stories are important to me through my own unique I/eye—the deeper social themes I had hoped to explore came into focus, the political released powerfully in my work, for which I am so thankful. Now I don’t worry about being confessional or any of that nonsense of labeling. I speak my truths and embrace the dissonance, those borderlands again that blur and shift. Find the shadowy borders in your life and become fearless in pointing out the disparities, the struggles, and the deeply personal connections you have to them.
Chantal Aida Gordon received her MFA in fiction from Warren Wilson College in 2016. She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Share this:
Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)61Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)61Click to share on Google+ (Opens in new window)
Related
An Interview With Larry Levis Post-Graduate Stipend Recipient Jenny Johnson
June 3, 2016
In "featured2"
An Interview with Alum Samara Kanegis
September 8, 2014
In "featured2"
An Interview with Holden Scholar Reginald Dwayne Betts
November 25, 2015
In "featured2"
About
Apply
MFA Store
Contact Us
Blog
CURRENT STUDENTS
ALUMNI
STORE
FRIENDS OF WRITERS
CONTACT US
BLOG
WARREN WILSON COLLEGE
Designed by Elegant Themes | Powered by WordPress
N/A
The Bind
a review site devoted to books by women and nonbinary authors
NEW REVIEWS BAD DRAWINGS ABOUT STAFF
Review of Jennifer Givhan's Protection Spell (University of Arkansas Press, 2017)
July 6, 2017
Drawing Out a Spell: a Review (with Erasure) of Jennifer Givhan’s Protection Spell
by José Angel Araguz
Protection spells typically deal with force and looking out for one’s self and others, two themes consistently at work in Jennifer Givhan’s Protection Spell. Whether it is standing one’s ground regarding family, as in the sequence of poems dealing with a neighbor’s racially-charged accusations against the speaker’s husband, or empathizing with and speaking in the voices of figures past and present who have survived physical and cultural violence, the poems in this collection are alive with the complexity of wanting to protect while needing to be protected as well. These are poems that engage human experience beyond the binary of aggression and passivity, and reflect a world where the two sides blur.
In “English 20: Developmental Writing,” for example, the speaker watches as one of her students passes around a coffer box, asking for donations for a recently deceased “sobrinito” (nephew). The speaker shares:
(even a miniature coffin costs too much).
After class, she asks for change
from her classmates and me, her teacher.
I fumble through my wallet
but find no bills, no coins, and apologize,
hoping she knows I don’t mean about the money.
I can’t tell her I came to campus today
bleeding my positive pregnancy test onto a pad.
She holds my gaze.
Maybe she doesn’t believe me about the change
but hears the heaviness in my voice.
Está bien. There’s no lesson here.
This moment is pivotal in the poem, as it is when the human awkwardness felt by the speaker-as-teacher juts against the speaker-as-mourner-herself. The social roles of teacher and student break for a moment, and what is glimpsed are two people aware of loss. When the speaker at the poem’s end says, “English is her second language. / I hear loss in her first,” it is an empathic statement; the speaker wouldn’t be able to “hear loss” without knowing how to, and wanting to, listen. In listening, the speaker allows an inner vulnerability to become compassion.
In approaching my erasure of Givhan's “The Polar Bear” (below), I tried to engage with this kind of listening. The original poem presents a meditation on human and animal violence, paralleling both sides so that the implications of survival ring through. In doing so, the speaker dwells on the complexity of what is being presented to her and her child via TV. Where the cliché has it that art imitates life, here life imitates (is) life; thus, the speaker’s insistence that “This is not an analogy.” When the boy in the poem asks “is this real?” the speaker has no answer but her own silent questioning.
José Angel Araguz's erasure of Jennifer Givhan's "The Polar Bear" from Protection Spell
José Angel Araguz's erasure of Jennifer Givhan's "The Polar Bear" from Protection Spell
Original poem from Jennifer Givhan's Protection Spell
Original poem from Jennifer Givhan's Protection Spell
Again, protection spells deal with force and looking out for one’s self and others. Performing such a spell puts one in a position of agency, but reaching for one requires vulnerability as well. This complicated duality is what I see as the heart of the poem and of the collection. With the idea of finding a “protection spell,” I focused on direct and personal language. What I learned in the process is how powerful the ice imagery is in the poem, how ice implies hardening, but also slipping. Underlying this poem meditating on human and animal violence, then, is the speaker’s yearning to understand it—for herself, her son, and the reader.
José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of six chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press) and Small Fires (FutureCycle Press). His poems, prose, and reviews have appeared in RHINO Poetry, New South, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. He runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.
In creative reviews, Jose, erasureTags jennifer givhan, the polar bear, protection spell, erasure, poetry, reviews, books
3 Likes
← Review of Sarah Sarai’s Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books, 2016)Review of Olivia Gatwood's New American Best Friend (Button Poetry, 2017) →
September 2017
Review of Mary Ruefle's My Private Property (Wave Books, 2016)
Sep 28, 2017
Review of Megan Levad's Why We Live in the Dark Ages (Tavern Books, 2015)
Sep 21, 2017
Review of Sara Uribe's Antígona González (Les Figues Press, 2016)
Sep 14, 2017
Review of Kathleen McGookey's Heart in a Jar (White Pine, 2017)
Sep 7, 2017
August 2017
Review of Catherine Pierce's The Tornado Is the World (Saturnalia, 2016)
Aug 31, 2017
Review of Imani Sims's (A)Live Heart (Sibling Rivalry, 2016)
Aug 24, 2017
Review of Jordan Rice's Constellarium (Orison Books, April 2016)
Aug 17, 2017
Review of Melissa Broder's Last Sext (Tin House, 2016)
Aug 10, 2017
Review of Jessica Jacobs's In Whatever Light Left to Us (Sibling Rivalry, 2016)
Aug 3, 2017
July 2017
Katherine Webb's Bad Drawings for Good Poetry: Jones
Jul 31, 2017
Review of Shelley Wong's Rare Birds (Diode Editions, 2017)
Jul 27, 2017
Review of Jenny Johnson's In Full Velvet (Sarabande, 2017)
Jul 20, 2017
Review of Sarah Sarai’s Geographies of Soul and Taffeta (Indolent Books, 2016)
Jul 13, 2017
Review of Jennifer Givhan's Protection Spell (University of Arkansas Press, 2017)
Jul 6, 2017
June 2017
Review of Olivia Gatwood's New American Best Friend (Button Poetry, 2017)
Jun 29, 2017
Katherine Webb's Bad Drawings for Good Poetry: Mortara
Jun 26, 2017
Review of Aziza Barnes's i be, but i ain't (YesYes Books, 2016)
Jun 22, 2017
Review of Amandine André's Circle of Dogs (Solar Luxuriance, 2015)
Jun 15, 2017
Review of Essy Stone's What It Done to Us (Lost Horse Press, 2017)
Jun 8, 2017
Review of Laurie Ann Guerrero's A Crown for Gumecindo (Aztlan Libre, 2015)
Jun 1, 2017
May 2017
Review of Marisa Crawford’s Reversible (Switchback Books, 2017)
May 25, 2017
Katherine Webb's Bad Drawings for Good Poetry: Limón
May 22, 2017
Review of Leah Poole Osowski's Hover Over Her (Kent State University, 2016)
May 18, 2017
Review of Tiana Clark’s Equilibrium (Bull City Press, 2016)
May 11, 2017
Review of Joshua Jennifer Espinoza's There Should Be Flowers (CCM, 2016) and Sarah Messer's Dress Made of Mice (Black Lawrence Press, 2015)
May 4, 2017
Review of Claudia Cortese's Wasp Queen (Black Lawrence Press, 2016)
May 3, 2017
Review of Debora Kuan's Lunch Portraits (Brooklyn Arts Press, 2016)
May 2, 2017
Review of francine j. harris’s play dead (Alice James, 2016)
May 1, 2017
Subscribe
Sign up with your email address and we'll send new reviews right to your inbox every week!
Email Address
SIGN UP
We respect your privacy.
Skip to content
Crab Fat Magazine
MASTHEAD
SEPTEMBER 2017
MONTHLY ARCHIVE
QUARTERLY ARCHIVE
CRAB FAT BLOG
#Orlando
Prose
flash fiction
short stories
creative nonfiction
Poetry
Visual Art
Interviews
Micro Reviews
SUBMIT
Pushcart Prize Nominations
Best of the Net Nominations
Bettering American Poetry Nominations
Best New Poets Nominations
LIT WE LOVE!
REVIEW // Protection Spell by Jennifer Givhan
Protection Spell by Jennifer Givhan (University of Arkansas Press, March 2017)
Paperback
ISBN 978-1-68226-028-9
102 pages
Trim 5 ½ × 8 ½
reviewed by Heidi Czerwiec
I must admit–I’m a big fan of Jennifer Givhan’s poetry, which I discovered due to the compelling cover of her first collection Landscape with Headless Mama. I loved that book for its poetry, about the fraught project of becoming a mother: miscarriages, adoption, fertility treatments, parenting in a mixed-race family, and the hairpin turns her language takes between lush, surreal imagery and blunt fact. When I saw her second book, Miller Williams Prize finalist Protection Spell, at the recent Association of Writers and Writing Programs’ conference bookfair–where, again, the cover caught my eye–I had to have it.
And again, the focus is family, but from a different angle. The metaphor raised in a few key poems, and that I think serves as a rubric for the book, is “dark matter,” that theorized substance that may or may not exist but that physicists say influences the universe: “…I’m covered in stuff we call dark // matter and the energy is pulling us through / emptiness” (“Earth” 63). In Protection Spell, race and racism are the dark matter that may have been invented by scientists, but which nonetheless influence Americans’ actions. It manifests its power in this collection in how the mixed-race Latina-American poet is treated as a girl, her mixed-race marriage, the family they assemble, and their fraught interactions with each other and the world.
There are echoes of the earlier book, allusions to lost children in “The Perennials,” “English 20: Developmental Writing,” but this personal loss is set against a larger and more topical loss – mothers of color terrified for or mourning the untimely loss of their sons. In fact, the collection opens with several poems that frame this fear. A short sequence “Race in America” begins its first section “i. Domestic Adoption” with the line “No joke, black babies are cheaper—” (7) before describing the son she can’t bear losing in “Prayer”: “God, if you/ ask me to let him go, I’ll say fuck no” (10). The most stunning of these poems is the one that inspired the choice of cover image, a painting of a polar bear (dead?) curled in a culvert, and is titled “The Polar Bear.” In it, the mother and son avoid the latest news coverage of riots by watching a nature show in which climate change has forced a starving polar bear to an island of walruses,
so he goes for it,
the dangerous hunt, the canine-sharp tusks
and armored hides for shields, the fused weapon
they create en masse, the whole island a system
for the elephant-large walruses who, in fear, huddle
together, who, in fear, fight back. This is not an analogy. (4)
This fear for her son stems from her very real fear of how black men are treated in this nation. Moving out from this point, the book circles around a central incident: her black husband is wrongfully accused of peeping on a showering white girl, and harassment and threats from the police and community force the family to move, first described in a dizzying list of conflicting details in the nightmarish poem “The Glance”:
When the police came to our door. Let me rephrase
that. When the police. They claimed you climbed
on a rock. They claimed it was a shower, the white
girl’s white mother. They claimed the window
was the shower’s and the window eight feet high.
They claimed you carried ladders or were made of stilts
or could form pebbles into whole rocks for climbing. (11)
Givhan possesses a terrifying capability for self-interrogation, and she reveals that, given her own history as a survivor of sexual assault, she initially believes the accusation. In a book about creating safe spaces of self-protection in a racist America, this betrayal is the ultimate threat:
The way I didn’t believe you at first
the way trauma works—
What else could I have done
but sided with the girl whose body
shamed her into silence? I mean, my body.
I mean, I know now there was no body. (“The Trial,” 28)
In order to forgive herself for this brief but looming betrayal, she confronts the assault in her past via several poems about violence against women of color around the world but mainly in Latin America and the U.S. Southwest. In particular, “Curanderisma” brings together the murdered women of Jemez, her own assault, and her buried miscarried babies in a poem that starts with girls, “Playing light as a feather stiff as a board in the backyard / after curfew with the girls we called ourselves witches” and ends with the poet admitting “I was never a murdered woman but a witch/ trying to make myself whole—” (54-5).
Givhan uses everything at her disposal – prayers, spells, dreams, mythic evocations – to keep her family safe, asserting “Imagination is an act/ of self-preservation” (“Resfeber (Re-Membering Trauma),” 38). But to return to her metaphor of dark matter, I think it’s worth noting that “matter” and “mother” have the same source word of mater, and that her love and her words form a powerful binding charm, “the dark/ matter holding us together” that ultimately is “what allowed me, through darkness, to see” (70).
Heidi Czerwiec is the author of two recent chapbooks – Sweet/Crude: A Bakken Boom Cycle and A Is For A-ke, The Chinese Monster – and of the forthcoming poetry collection Maternal Imagination, and is the editor of North Dakota Is Everywhere: An Anthology of Contemporary North Dakota Poets. She lives in Minneapolis. Visit her at heidiczerwiec.com.
Save pagePDF pageEmail pagePrint page
Like this:
Post navigation
OLDER POST
Dorian J. Sinnott
NEWER POST
Lisa Baird
Leave a Comment
Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *
NAME *
EMAIL *
WEBSITE
POST COMMENT
Notify me of new posts by email.
ISSN 2374-2526
RECENT POSTS
September 2017
August 2017
Loathe/Love/Lathe // Alain Ginsberg
Atheist Issue 2017
Best of the Net Nominations 2017
TOP POSTS
September 2017
Atheist Issue 2017
ARCHIVES
September 2017
August 2017
July 2017
May 2017
April 2017
March 2017
February 2017
January 2017
December 2016
November 2016
October 2016
September 2016
August 2016
July 2016
June 2016
May 2016
April 2016
March 2016
February 2016
January 2016
December 2015
November 2015
October 2015
September 2015
August 2015
July 2015
June 2015
May 2015
April 2015
March 2015
February 2015
January 2015
December 2014
November 2014
October 2014
September 2014
August 2014
July 2014
June 2014
PayPal - The safer, easier way to pay online!
Report your response times at Duotrope
Listed on NewPages data-recalc-dims=
#WeNeedDiverseBooks
SUBSCRIBE VIA EMAIL
Email Address
Email Address
FOLLOW
Search for:
Search …
TAGS
abuse adolescents art collage coming of age confusion death depression discovery drinking Drugs experimental family father issues fiction flash food free verse gay growing up ink lesbian LGBTQ love marriage memories mother issues nature non-linear painting poetry prose prose poetry queer questioning reflection rejection relationships second person sex sexuality southern suicide transgender verse
META
Register
Log in
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
WordPress.org
CONTACT US:
editor@crabfatmagazine.com
fiction@crabfatmagazine.com
@CrabFatMagazine
Copyright 2014-2016: Crab Fat Magazine & Contributors
View Full Version of PW.com »
BEST BOOKSAUTHORSPUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Protection Spell
Jennifer Givhan. Univ. of Arkansas, $17.95 trade paper (102p) ISBN 978-1-68226-028-9
In a second collection that beats with multiple hearts, Givhan (Landscape with Headless Mama) addresses complicated familial identity, writing of her own Mexican-American background, her mixed-race husband, and their adopted black child. The book is full of anxiety over the vulnerability of children, specifically her own child’s identity and how she can protect him. Givhan writes of the initial apprehension, “after the gauge of my uterus/ had fixed itself on empty.// I’d made peace with the threat of/ you’re not my ‘real’ mother.” She also confronts the racism embedded in the adoption process: how the “white ones cost ten grand more.” Throughout, Givhan exposes the enduring animosity and aggression towards biracial families, doing so with candor and sparkling language. Every line is tightly composed, and the sensory details pull the reader towards the poet as she recounts her splintered world—her past as well as the present world she creates and navigates as a woman and a mother of color. Chronicling the cruelty that children endure at the hands of adults, Givhan casts the eponymous spell for her son and her family. Givhan asks readers to witness racial inequity beside her and imagine a better future—how, we, too, have the power to cast a spell so that every human feels secure, safe, protected. (Feb.)
DETAILS
Protection Spell
BUY THIS BOOK
The Best Books, Emailed Every Week
Tip Sheet!
email address
Submit
MORE BOOKS YOU'D LIKE
Some Say the LarkIn the Still of the NightSilencerHeaven Is All GoodbyesI Know Your KindMagnetic Point: Selected PoemsSome BeheadingsShadowboxing: Poems & ImpersonationsOf AnnunciationsBludIn Darwin’s RoomSky CountryImaginary RoyaltySilk PoemsWe’re On: A June Jordan ReaderElectric ArchesHothouseGood Stock Strange BloodThousand Star HotelIn on the Great JokeBlackoutMy Mother Was a Freedom FighterDebthsObscenity for the Advancement of PoetryLandscape with Sex and ViolenceEco-DementiaMadnessLate EmpireFor Want of WaterThe Children Are ReadingSun in Days: PoemsRummageRocket Fantastic: PoemsSome Say: PoemsDistant Mandate: PoemsPhrasisQuestions of Travel: William Morris in IcelandQuickening FieldsGondwana and Other Poems
ADVERTISEMENT
MORE FROM PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2017
5 Writing Tips from Harlan Coben
PW Picks: Books of the Week
Top 10 John Ashbery Poems
About Us| Contact Us| Submission Guidelines| Subscriber Services| Advertising Info| Terms of Use| Privacy Policy| Calls for Info| Editorial Calendar| Archives| Press| FAQ
© PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
News
Obituaries
Book Deals
Financial Reporting
Page to Screen
Bookselling
Awards & Prizes
Publisher News
Comics
Business Deals
Shows & Events
Cooking
People
Religion
Audio Books
Manufacturing
Marketing
PW Tip Sheet
Licensing
Book It
BookExpo
Reviews
Fiction
Nonfiction
Children's
Religion
Comics
Audio
Web Exclusive
BookLife
Bestsellers
Audiobooks
Australia Overall
Bio/Autobiography
Children's Frontlist Fiction
Children's Picture Books
Cookbooks
Fantasy
Graphic Novels
Hardcover Fiction
Hardcover Nonfiction
History
Mass Market
Mystery/Detective
New Zealand Overall
Religion Fiction
Religion Nonfiction
Romance
Sci-Fi
Top 10 Overall
Trade Paper
UK Overall
Children's
Authors
Book News
Industry News
Authors
Profiles
Interviews
Why I Write
BookLife
MFA
Announcements
Adult Announcements
Children's Announcements
Religion Listings
On-Sale Calendar
Galley Talk
Digital
Devices
Copyright
Retailing
Conferences
Content / e-books
Apps
The Roundup
International
Deals
Book News
Trade Shows
Frankfurt Book Fair
London Book Fair
Job Zone
Job Moves
Opinion
ShelfTalker
Soapbox
Common Core
Open Book