The Big Poetry Giveaway 2012

In honor of National Poetry Month, I’m participating in Kelli Russell Agodon’s Big Poetry Giveaway. In addition to my collection, Two-Headed Nightingale, I’m also offering Bruce Snider’s Paradise, Indiana and the Complete Poems of Marianne Moore. To enter the drawing, please leave your name and email address in the comments section by April 30. Winners announced May 1.

(**Interested in purchasing any of the following titles? For the month of April, Powell’s is offering a 15% discount on poetry.)

 

Two-Headed Nightingale

The birds that populate Shara Lessley’s rich and elegant debut collection are avatars that mediate experiences of loss and violence haunting the deepest reaches of the human psyche. In language that is luxurious and musical Lessley creates the two-headed nightingale that is not so much a freak of nature as it is a paradox of the imagination and as such its special and disturbing gift of sight gives us access to the terrible and beautiful double nature of the self.
        —Michael Collier

Paradise, Indiana

A father and son shovel snow from a driveway; a boy accidentally sets himself on fire; two boys fish for bluegill; a young drag queen returns home to die. At the center of it all, a teenage boy’s suicide resonates through the lives of those closest to him ... Paradise, Indiana envisions a seldom recorded rural America, one where everything exists side by side: the county fair and an abandoned small town gay bar, farmers and cross-dressers, death and hope, beauty and despair ... The poems in Bruce Snider’s Paradise, Indiana describe a place where mundane events neighbor the most harrowing.
            —Pleiades / LSU Press

 
Complete Poems

The art of Marianne Moore is not just the valuable art of observation. She is magical. Her poems do have riddles. They can irk us. But they finally carry us forward by the strength of language and, in her own words, the poet’s “burning desire to be explicit.” Nothing is wasted. All is transformed.

            —Sandra Hochman