Bøger af Sarah McKinstry-Brown

"With heartbreaking insight, Sarah McKinstry-Brown tells of Demeter and Persephone as the story of a mother who has lost her daughter to male violence. These plainspoken, elegant poems give voice to tomboys, girls coming into their sexual power, their mothers and grandmothers, newscasters unspooling the latest version of the 'gone girl' narrative, pregnant women, mothers who miscarry, and flowers who give advice. In crystalline verse, McKinstry-Brown shows us girls like 'peonies / hanging their heads under the weight / of their own blossoming,' and women who learn that 'the heart becomes offal / when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren.' THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS is the meditation and the medicine we need as we confront male violence in our current moment."-Lisa L. Moore"Exquisite craft and strikingly tender aesthetics merge brilliantly with the urgency of complex gender politics in Sarah McKinstry-Brown's THIS BRIGHT DARKNESS. While many of the poems in the collection reach back in time and mythology, the book could not be more essential and more poignant than it is right at this moment. McKinstry-Brown writes of a time 'when a mother is told over and over / that her daughter is just another / siren, warning, a story to be taught.' And isn't this time now? And how desperately we need these poems to teach us to know what is at stake."¿-Stacey Waite

"It's terrible, / getting what you want, / because that's when you know you'll always want / something different" confesses the speaker in Cradling Monsoons with a fabulously poignant bravado that keeps the reader tractor-beamed in thrall and enthralled within the light of these smart, funny, heartbreakingly gorgeous poems. Opening with a poem about a father who "cut down his family tree / to build a bridge from Kokomo to San Francisco that's still burning," the speaker in Sarah McKinstry-Brown's poems conversely puts down roots and stays for the birth of a first child whose arrival sets the city of everything she knew before on fire. Curbing her own impulses for wanderlust and fire-starting, she instead stands squarely within the blaze that is motherhood and family-that cycle of immolation, flame, ash, and rekindling-in poems that gracefully shape shift between the different, conflicting identities contemporary women embody: daughter, lover, mother, artist. These poems make art from life, and reveal the making and living of life as an art of terrible power and tenderness. These poems are pure muscle, fierce heart. -Lee Ann Roripaugh, Author of On the Cusp of a Dangerous YearThe poems in this stunning first collection are "accessible" in the best sense of that word, in the sense that Stephen Dunn's, Dorianne Laux's, and Ted Kooser's are. The subjects come mostly from everyday life-Picture Day at school, a Folgers commercial, comfort food, December in Omaha, "the Tall, Blonde-haired, Blue-eyed, Smart, Talented Woman who Keeps Hitting on my Husband" -in which the poet discovers the extraordinary. The lines seem like intense conversation, but they are, at the same time, deeply engaging poetry that shows a mastery of sound and rhythm and a gift for creating fresh, radiant metaphors. I'm reminded of how great dancers and acrobats must learn to move in a way that looks natural and effortless. Or, as Pope put it, "True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,/As those move easiest who have learned to dance." Like our best poets, Sarah McKinstry Brown has learned. -William Trowbridge, Author of Ship of FoolHeaven, the black keys on a grand piano! This collection pits tension between reality and desire, cultivating a world rich with lived imagination. In Sarah McKinstry-Brown's grasp, language tackles the world of marriage, pregnancies and family with a complex love capable of cradling frustrations and grief with a patience that can ride through any monsoons and still trust there will be air to breathe soon enough. -Lisa Gill, Author of Mortar & Pestle and The RelentingBIO:Winner of the Academy of American Poets Prize, Sarah McKinstry-Brown studied poetry at the University of New Mexico, the University of Sheffield, England, and the University of Nebraska. In 2004, she won the Blue Light Poetry Prize for her collection When You Are Born and has since been published everywhere from West Virginia's