The Wishing Tomb - Softcover

Amanda Auchter

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0979458250 ISBN 13: 9780979458255

Publisher: Perugia Press, 2012

Synopsis

Winner of the 2012 Perugia Press Prize, The Wishing Tomb is a love letter to New Orleans, that quintessential city of jazz and yellow fevers, of hurricanes and Creole cuisine. The poems show how we all are connected to our homes, how history sometimes escapes us, and how even in our tragedies, we can be made whole again by rebuilding and moving forward. The collection creates a portrait of America's cultural, urban, and historical landscape, and Auchter finds those moments in a long history that magnify irony and wonder to create a morally serious whole. The writing has momentum, formal attention, and is obsessive in the best way.

About this title

About the Author:

Amanda Auchter is the founding editor of Pebble Lake Review and the author of The Glass Crib, winner of the 2010 Zone 3 Press First Book Award, and of the chapbook, Light Under Skin. She has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Theodore Morrison Poetry Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Marica and Jan Vilcek Prize for Poetry, the Mary C. Mohr Poetry Award, and the James Wright Poetry Award. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and teaches creative writing and literature at Lone Star College in Houston, Texas.

Review:

The Wishing Tomb is a lyric history of New Orleans' beauty and brutality, both human and environmental. Amanda Auchter is a poet of rare elegance and dexterity who writes just as movingly about gunshot as she does the markings of brick-scratch left on the tomb of Marie Laveau. Every city deserves the subtle attention of such a poet, a poet brave and nimble enough to touch every line of the city's rough, loved, and disastrous skin --Katie Ford

In these textured, deftly-crafted stanzas, Amanda Auchter romances the grit, the rampant spice, the twang, the mystery, the brick, the swelter, and the insistent hallelujah conjured by the Crescent City. This sparkling, defiant love story pays tribute to NOLA on the upswing, while remembering how often it has teetered on the edge of descent. --Patricia Smith

About this edition

• Publisher: Perugia Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0979458250
• ISBN 13: 9780979458255
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 88