Description
Book SynopsisUnholy Heart is a collection of Grace Bauer’s best selected poems, marking her twenty-five years as an award-winning poet.
Trade Review“Grace Bauer is a first-rate narrative metaphysician, telling stories as ideas and ideas as stories. . . . A keen inventiveness lights up every poem in this new and selected collection, in which the beautifully, uniquely observed detail exists not for its own sake but as one more clue leading us toward unsettling discoveries.”—Dorothy Barresi, author of
What We Did While We Made More Guns “
Unholy Heart offers us a record of a poet, steadily, and with craft, deep reflection, wit, sensuality, and honesty—building a case for the dismantling of patriarchy through the challenge of persistent myths that undergird American culture, from the Bible to popular culture to art history to various mythologies of ancient and present mintage. With masterful use of ekphrastic poetry, persona poems, narrative poems, formal poems, and free verse, Grace Bauer’s body of work, presented beautifully and generously in this volume, is a welcome and important addition to the poetry of the Midwest, and to the poetry of America.”—Kwame Dawes, author of
Nebraska: Poems “In
Unholy Heart we witness the unfolding of a life, a voice, and a spirit, often as the speaker inhabits other voices, from the biblical Marys to Marilyn Monroe, via iconic visual artists and their art, and via a range of landscapes, of homes seen anew. ‘What I once called home / today seems strange,’ Bauer writes as the biblical Ruth, and it is that perception and re-perception, and an intensifying openness to mystery and interior journeying, that characterizes this collection.”—Diane Seuss, author of
Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a GirlTable of ContentsAcknowledgments
From
The Women at the Well Eve Recollecting the Garden
Noah’s Wife Addresses the Department of the Interior
Lot’s Daughters Bent on Revenge
Ruth: On Wandering. On Wonder.
Judith Dreaming of Her General
Mary Recalling Bethlehem
Anne: On the Darkness in Daughters
Salome: The Choreography of Guilt
The Prodigal Daughter’s Girl
Pilate’s Wife Welcoming Nightmare
Martha to Mary: The Quotidian Demands of the Flesh
Mary to Martha: The Theological Insignificance of Dust
Mary Magdalene’s Chapter and Verse
Mary: A Confession and Complaint
The Women at the Well
From Retreats & Recognitions
Note from the Imaginary Daughter
Norma Jean Dreams a Blonde Finale
A Little Like Dorothy
Retreat
Modern Clothing
Theadosia Comes to the New World
Plot Lines
Fat Tuesday
Second Lining at My Own Jazz Funeral
Star
Latter Day Saints
Extreme Unction
Midlife Heavy Metal
On Finding a Footnote to Truckin’
Broke Down Palace
Lunacy
Geography Lessons
From
Beholding Eye Portraits of the Rich
Large Bathers
Mrs. Eakins’s Final Touches
Frida Digresses on Red
Room in New York
Birthday
Georgia, at Ninety, Learns to Make a Vessel
The Eye of the Beholder
Descending Nude
Rrose Sélavy No Longer Sings La Vie en Rose
Marcel Meets Georgia at 291
Where You’ve Seen Her
Her Search for Great Causes
Her Great Escape
For Her Villain
She Has Days
From
Nowhere All At Once Nowhere All At Once
Sight/Seeing
Great Plains Prayer
Revenant
Against Lawn
The Bat
Gray Ghazal
Our Waitress’s Marvelous Legs
The Persistent Popularity of Angels
Two for The Bard and Bob Wood
Unrepentant Prayer
Off the Map
Still Life in Red
Flicker
Against Prayer
Corson’s Inlet
From
MEAN/TIME A Riff on the Glyph(s)
Conditional
MEAN/TIME
“Books Become Windows”
Still Life as Oxymoron
Torsos
The Wandering Dream
Momentous
Against Proof
Fret
Sad September Song
Dyslexical
Caw
Means of Transport
Dusting the Angel
Glimpse
New Poems
Fado
Terminal Grief
Sustenance
Provisions for the Journey
Prayer
Father, Faltering
Doldrums
Unspeakable Elegy
Mother, May I
Terminal Beauty
All My Dead Say Grace
Highway 2 Mirage
Not Quite Nirvana
Update on Emily
Notes
