The Mouths of Grazing Things (Wisconsin Poetry Series) - Softcover

Boyden, Jennifer

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0299235149 ISBN 13: 9780299235147

Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010

Synopsis

The Mouths of Grazing Things is an unflinching, lyrical meditation on nature’s forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing, estrangement, magnetism, and self-otherness that ensue. Arrestingly tender and fiercely protective of where nature lurks in and out of us still, Boyden translates for a new landscape where a brain in a jar is anchored by an apple, a fly-tying fisherman finds love songs to fish scattered among the barber’s sweepings, and the players at “the most dangerous playground in the world” prepare for anything with one fist clenched and the other full of sugar. In poems built to survive an unsafe journey, this book delivers the now-beyond, the almost-was, the near-forgotten, and the just-in-time.

About this title

About the Author:

Jennifer Boyden, a Minnesota native, lives in Washington State and teaches literature and writing. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, and The Mid-American Review. Boyden’s awards include the PEN Northwest writing residency and a Washington State Artist Trust Grant. This is her first full-length collection.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

I dedicate this fly to the fish
of the fallen river. It is a poem
of hook and shank and feather.
It sinks like a bone, casts
like the logic of knives.
The song of my own hair, it is
how I call them from their stones.—excerpt from “The Fly Tier’s Monomania”© The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0299235149
• ISBN 13: 9780299235147
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 102