Totem: America - Softcover
Moving through losses both private and public, the poems in Totem: America, Debra Kang Dean's third full-length collection, sing of a thee who is sometimes a beloved, sometimes a country, and sometimes both.
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Praise for Totem: America
Debra Kang Dean's Totem: America is a brilliant examination of loss and longing, of grief turned to grievance. Pairing her analytical mind with her passion for music, Dean creates poems that enact intelligence and craft with a voice unfolding in calm syntax. The subtlest phrasings in Dean's poems are deftly transformative and intoxicatingly radiant. A sharp wit and muscular imagination are her gifts, leaving the reader with the pure delight of gorgeous poetry. Totem: America, a necessary work for our survival in these strange times, testifies to our humanity.--Eugene Gloria
A woman consoles a broken plate. Meanwhile, a father, haunted by his son's beauty, set fire to him to purge his own desire. These are some of the many ways people in Debra Kang Dean's Totem: America try to "refuse brokenness." Smart, searing, and occasionally humorous, her poems chronicle what it means to be breathing our nation's vast and poisonous airs. With language precise as a tuning fork, each page of Totem: America is an instance of music--dark, dazzling, dissonant music too resonant to ignore.--Tony Leuzzi
"This is / a virtual sound of grief turned / grievance--and that is my grief," writes poet Debra Kang Dean in Totem: America. In her heart-rending new collection, a ghostly smoke, delicate and blue, swirls around every word of each accomplished line. These poems ask us to rekindle our love for this marvelous and mysterious world, even for those things we can never understand or accept.--Kathleen Driskell
These poems remind me of the value--the necessity--of slow, deep, deliberate, looking. Looking that happens with beautiful and precise music, with expertly crafted images, with story and association. They remind me, too, that this kind of looking is also often called reflection. Because in looking, we can be illuminated.--Ross Gay
About the Author:
Debra Kang Dean's Totem: America is a brilliant examination of loss and longing, of grief turned to grievance. Pairing her analytical mind with her passion for music, Dean creates poems that enact intelligence and craft with a voice unfolding in calm syntax. The subtlest phrasings in Dean's poems are deftly transformative and intoxicatingly radiant. A sharp wit and muscular imagination are her gifts, leaving the reader with the pure delight of gorgeous poetry. Totem: America, a necessary work for our survival in these strange times, testifies to our humanity.--Eugene Gloria
A woman consoles a broken plate. Meanwhile, a father, haunted by his son's beauty, set fire to him to purge his own desire. These are some of the many ways people in Debra Kang Dean's Totem: America try to "refuse brokenness." Smart, searing, and occasionally humorous, her poems chronicle what it means to be breathing our nation's vast and poisonous airs. With language precise as a tuning fork, each page of Totem: America is an instance of music--dark, dazzling, dissonant music too resonant to ignore.--Tony Leuzzi
"This is / a virtual sound of grief turned / grievance--and that is my grief," writes poet Debra Kang Dean in Totem: America. In her heart-rending new collection, a ghostly smoke, delicate and blue, swirls around every word of each accomplished line. These poems ask us to rekindle our love for this marvelous and mysterious world, even for those things we can never understand or accept.--Kathleen Driskell
These poems remind me of the value--the necessity--of slow, deep, deliberate, looking. Looking that happens with beautiful and precise music, with expertly crafted images, with story and association. They remind me, too, that this kind of looking is also often called reflection. Because in looking, we can be illuminated.--Ross Gay
Debra Kang Dean is the author of News of Home and Precipitates, both from BOA Editions; Back to Back and Fugitive Blues, both prize-winning chapbooks; and Morning's Spell, a chapbook of renku written with Russ Kesler. Her poems have been featured on Poetry Daily and Verse Daily, and her essays are included in the expanded edition of The Colors of Nature: Culture, Identity, and the Natural World and in Until Everything Is Continuous Again: American Poets on the Recent Work of W. S. Merwin. She teaches in Spalding University s low-residency MFA in Writing Program.
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- PublisherTiger Bark Press
- Publication date2018
- ISBN 10 0997630590
- ISBN 13 9780997630596
- BindingPerfect Paperback
- Edition number1
- Number of pages114
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