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
The Laugh We Make When We Fall

The Laugh We Make When We Fall

Firer, Susan

Paperback

Series: Backwaters Prize in Poetry

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $15.95

ISBN10: 1496225988
ISBN13: 9781496225986
Publisher: Univ Of Nebraska Pr
Published: Aug 1 2021
Pages: 67
Weight: 0.27
Height: 0.22 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
In Susan Firer's The Laugh We Make When We Fall, peonies; snow drops, with all their survivor ecstasies; windy caravans of lilacs; and Dali Lama-robed daylilies act as magnets to attract history--personal and historical--myths, language, facts, love, gratitude, prayers, beauty, and all the colors of death and sex. Family oddities appear in this collection, as well as Catholic rituals, saints, and ghost poets. Always ghost poets: Whitman, Neruda, Thoreau, and Saint Francis.

In these poems, toads/ pull their finished skins off/ delicately as evening gloves, and in Birds you can look into an injured bird's neck and see everywhere it had ever flown... see insects, & seeds, & amphibians, / & even a piece or two of snake. Using list poems, exploded elemental odes, lyrics, and American sonnets, Firer writes her own survivor ecstasies: I was buried under/deaths: mother's, father's, sisters' deaths wrapped me/ like surgical wrap. And who and where would I be/ when all their gauzy deaths were removed? In poem after poem in this collection, Firer begins to explore and to answer that question. This collection is a wild generosity of spirit, creating an effect that is sacramental.

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