Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • 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
The Curiosities

The Curiosities

Perham, Brittany

Paperback

Series: Free Verse Editions

General ReferenceWriting InstructionGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 1602352399
ISBN13: 9781602352391
Publisher: Parlor Pr Lcc
Published: Nov 3 2011
Pages: 72
Weight: 0.27
Height: 0.18 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Brittany Perham's first collection, THE CURIOSITIES, fixes its sure and unsettling gaze on daughters and fathers, sisters and brothers, madness, sickness, longing and love. These poems make up a cabinet of curiosities because they hold what is fascinating or frightening, beautiful or awesome- a stomach plumed by syringe, a zoo's lost leopard, a forest of high-waisted trees- up to the eye. In their image-making, the poems place language itself beneath the glass slide of a microscope in order to discern its component structures, its natural patterns. Curiosity here is a way of looking-unsatisfiable, looping back on itself, yielding only further questions. In these uncanny and passionate poems our own lives are made strange to us, and we are wonderstruck. WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING: The poems in The Curiosities make a powerful system, almost an atmosphere out of stories of the body and memories of place. In poem after poem, the speaker is mysterious but never remote; the language is deliberate but never staged. And at all times, the music, intensity and craft of the work bring us close. This is a wonderful debut collection.-EAVAN BOLAND With curatorial precision and a starling's penchant for multiple threads in both song and shelter, Brittany Perham has fashioned a haven of curiosities captivating to the ear as well as the eye. These poems dream in color and sound: bright, chantant, lifting and lowering the music and the light, so that we are transported from this world into the antechambers of the heart and back again. You cannot re-enter the waking world after reading these lucid, eloquent poems and not feel forever changed.-D. A. POWELL As with all wunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, it is the quality of the collected wonders that matters. A brother's illness, a family's disintegration and abiding bonds, the odd dignity of children, a teacher's suicide, loss and redemption of a vital love-these old stories, in Brittany Perham's hands, become new. Poems whose titles derive from other poets and poems-Wyatt, Frost, Dickinson, nursery rhyme-serve as touchstones, letting us know that although a hard season of strange forsaking has passed, in its wake is a coming to terms with pain's exactitude and the happinesses that, as Dickinson said, would be life. In Afterlove, the poet describes her wary hope as stiff carriers crowd[ing] / my rooms, an army of competing clatter / and rust, yet she dares to further hope: I saw there was something still / for each of us to want. // Gulls dispersed, white / above the roofline, so white / I could not tell / one from the other, nor one / from the sky. Such ecstasy and oneiric yearning are just two marvels of this irresistible collection.-LISA RUSS SPAAR BRITTANY PERHAM is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow from 2009-2011. Her work may be found in the Bellevue Literary Review, Drunken Boat, Lo-Ball, Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.

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