Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Architect

Architect

Thumel, Alison

Paperback

Series: Miller Williams Poetry Prize

General Poetry

ISBN10: 1682262480
ISBN13: 9781682262481
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Published: Mar 21 2024
Pages: 74
Weight: 0.25
Height: 0.20 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English

Finalist, 2025 Kate Tufts Discovery Award


When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life, writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect. In this debut collection, the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright become a blueprint for elegy, as Thumel overlays the language of architecture with the language of grief to raze and reconstruct memories, metaphors, and myths. With obsessive and exacting focus, the poet leads us through room after room in a search to answer whether it is possible to rebuild in the wake of loss. Meanwhile, the midwestern landscape beyond these rooms-the same landscape that infuses the low, horizontal forms of Wright's Prairie Style buildings-shapes the figures in Architect as well as their fates: For years after my brother's death, I collected news articles on people who died young and tragically in landlocked states. Prairie Style deaths-boys sucked down into grain silos or swept up by tornadoes or fallen through a frozen pond. The boys I didn't know, but the landscape I did. The dread of it. How many miles you can look ahead. For how long you see what is coming.

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