The Moons of August - Softcover

Lameris, Danusha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1932870954 ISBN 13: 9781932870954

Publisher: Autumn House Press, 2014

Synopsis

Winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Contest, selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. This stunning debut collection explores family culture, motherhood, and memory.

About this title

About the Author:

DANUSHA LAMERIS lives in Santa Cruz, California, where, after completing a B.A. in Fine Arts at U.C. Santa Cruz, she studied at the Squaw Valley Writers Workshops and with the poet Ellen Bass. Her poems have been published in: American Poetry Review, New Letters, Crab Orchard Review, Poetry Northwest, Alaska Quarterly Review, The SUN, and Rattle, among other journals. Her work has also been included in several anthologies, including The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry. Her poem, "Riding Bareback," was selected by Gary Young as the winner of the 2013 Morton Marcus Memorial Poetry, while another poem, "The God of Numbers," received a special mention in the 2015 Pushcart Prize anthology. The Moons of August, her first book, was chosen by Naomi Shihab Nye as the winner of the 2013 Autumn House Press Poetry Prize and was a finalist for the 2015 Bingham University Milt Kessler Poetry Book Award. She teaches ongoing, independent writing workshops, as well as working with individual writers.

Review:

This book of motherhood, memory, and elegiac urgency crosses borders, cultures, and languages to bring us the good news of being alive. With language clear as water and rich as blood, The Moons of August offers a human communion we can all believe in. Reckoning with and grieving for the past as they claim the future, these poems are wise, direct, and fearless. "What's gone / is not quite gone, but lingers," Laméris reminds us. "Not the language, but the bones / of the language. Not the beloved, / but the dark bed the beloved makes / inside our bodies." --Dorianne Laux

Danusha Laméris writes with definitive, savoring power in perfectly well-weighted lines and scenes. Her poems strike deeply, balancing profound loss and new finding, employing a clear eye, a way of being richly alive with appetite and gusto, and a gift of distilling experience to find its shining core. Don t miss this stunning first book. --Naomi Shihab Nye

About this edition

• Publisher: Autumn House Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 1932870954
• ISBN 13: 9781932870954
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96