Awards/Distinctions

Janice Worthen recommends

Attraversiamo by Monique Ferrell

Monique Ferrell builds a sweeping constellation in ATTRAVERSIAMO with long lines that are filled with the tough, the tender, the held breath, hiccup sob, and exhalation. She takes on/takes in everything that plagues and everything that persists and everything that falls and rises. Each line weaves time and space as it rushes forward and crosses over barriers, and assumptions, and certainties. She writes "the mixture of dread inspiration/ and the faintest scent of hope" (18). She writes the black body, the poor body, the female body, the god and giant body, the body that doesn't get to go home because of the violence of another body: "bullets are the wind chimes that singsong our existence" (53). She writes the beauty and strength and tenderness of each body. Nations rise and fall, neighborhoods breathe and are broken and breathe again, and history haunts the water under planes and the streets of every city in her brave and vulnerable lines that grieve and wonder and embrace. The big and small are on the page but they are also in the body, the skin and bone, in the sudden absence and the carrying on. I'll keep this book in arm's reach to remind myself that "I want to be responsible" (19).

Link: www.spdbooks.org/pages/staff-picks/default.aspx

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