Description
Book SynopsisWith intelligence and crystalline clarity, a chorus of female voices speaks through the poems in Her book, Eireann Lorsung's inspired second collection. From the poet who brought us Music For Landing Planes By, Eireann Lorsung's luminous voice is distilled through multiple unnamed female speakers in this, her second collection. Full of youth, wonder, and imagination, Her book crosses distances and generations to celebrate the lives of women, their individual and shared experiences, and the bonds that bring them together. This is also a book about translation (of experience into art, of knowledge across time and space) and conversation (with, for instance, work by Kiki Smith, widely known as a feminist artist). Lorsung writes additionally about her time spent in England and friendships she formed with women there. Together these poems comprise both her book (Lorsung's), and hers (encompassing all who identify with that word).
Trade Review"In Her book, Eireann Lorsung inhabits the uncertain and fluid boundaries between the body and the world, the self and the other. For the poet, the word searches out the image and gives it substance. For the reader, these poems offer a materiality of their own: [The body's] 'speech packs around it like wasp/ paper. Speaking a thin, permanent/ archive.' The poems in this volume breach the ordinary parameters of space, time, and sense perception. To experience them is to occupy the space between in a surprising and yet subtle way." --Kathleen Jesme "Part ecstatic recollection of the many ways places and objects leave their indelible marks upon our bodies and brains, and part timeless ode to the strange female beast that pounds inside of us all, Her book resurrects the enchanting power of personal and historically feminine mythology. Exacting, and at the same time utterly magical, Lorsung's work opens a door to an unusually radiant universe where everything within is set ablaze by pure wonderment." --Ada Limon "Eireann Lorsung's Her book has something of the gurlesque to it: 'The most gentle apocalypse in the world.' But this will lead the reader, with remarkable sureness, not toward the viscera of the gender spectacle revealed via exaggeration, but rather into the miniature, the closely observed, the travesties and utopias of the quietest moments. It is from these moments that the whole is constructed, the molecules that compose both her book and her life in a 'Collision of the cellular level and the structures.' It is an aching and eloquent whole indeed." --Joshua Clover "There is always a voice in Lorsung's book 'calling you to wilderness,' and the result is pitch-perfect language coupled with astounding imagery. These highly confident poems make up a wonderful debut collection." -American Poet "In this amazing first book, Eireann Lorsung enters deeply into the everyday-only to emerge awestruck, open, and generous. In her hands both the world and the word are transformed into something radiant." -Nick Flynn "Music for Landing Planes By is a young woman's loves song to the planet. Images flock from a vivid pastoral world, uncarded fleece, wrens in thatch, chaff, lathe, and hasp, joining the speaker in her effort to stitch prayer and dream, city and country, into one shimmering fabric of ardor." -Leslie Adrienne Miller
Table of Contents1 / Fifteen poems for Kiki Smith Revelation Carrier (standing woman carrying wolf) Standing Rapture Untitled (camera) Girl with chain It falls into ruin by its own weight Scaffold body Daughters Dowry cloth Honey brain The cells--the moon Familiars Stars and scat Blue blanket 2 / Girllife First principles Historical fragment Pink A collection of beauties at the height of their popularity And so the last day came, and the last hour of the last day Bee summer City pleasure England, or the continent I had in mind when I came here Sweets Live bees The birdwoman at Grasmere Smooth stone, fox How it all began Historical fragment The birdwoman in the cathedral International postage coupon Bird construction Honey 3 / Reconstruction Autoportrait tree Post Think on the lilies of the field Listening to other people's praying Creation tune Sewing together Quilt with birds Eating the archive Single page drawing Transubstantiation
