Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-205).
Contents:
Introduction: taking poetry personally -- Immersion: "Red sugar" by Jan Beatty -- Thresholds: "Garden gate" by Bill Manhire -- Spacetime: "Death of a field" by Paula Meehan -- Fiction: "Faith" by Tim Seibles -- Suspense: "The unicorn" by Maria Hummel -- Voice: "Six, sex, say" by Barbara Hamby -- Magic: "Ahi Kā -- the House of Ngā Puhi" by Robert Sullivan -- Self: "My brother, my wound" by Natalie Diaz -- Brevity: "Postcard mailed from the airport" by Rafael Campo -- Participation: "And this was how it started" by Niall Campbell -- Change: "Hoodie" by January Gill O'Neil -- Irresolution: "At Delphi" by Cynthia Hogue -- Coda: flow.
Summary:
In her debut essay collection, award-winning poet and critic Lesley Wheeler tells the story of her father's unraveling. While she studies poetry in New Zealand on a Fulbright fellowship, his dishonesty smashes her parents' marriage and destroys their savings. Nothing is resolved, even after his death. The past and present keep shifting. Reading contemporary poetry helps Wheeler negotiate the crisis. Cognitive scientists use the term "literary transportation" to describe getting lost in a book--and poems can transport a person, too, not despite but because they are brief and full of gaps. Wheeler's frank, lively essays demonstrate how traveling through a poem's pocket universe can change people for the better.--from Distributor's Site
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