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Tupelo PressThe Us
$16.95
Paperback Original ISBN: 978-1-932195-77-4 SynopsisThe Us, Joan Houlihan’s tantalizing third book of poetry, is a poetic sequence spoken in the collective voice of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Incompatible with a stronger, more advanced culture (“Thems”), the Us must live outside civilization in order to be free and fully alive. Practical and canny, the Us are also possessed by a sense of awe expressed in superstition and ritual. With echoes of classical mythology, age-old legends, and resilient allegory, this is an absorbing and altogether unique book of poetry. Houlihan’s language is ancient in sound and texture yet entirely modern in impact.From “Froze by winter blast”: Froze by winter blast us could not grip on meat or crust, fingers blackened down to all the hand. And many fell that time and so were fewer count of us coming into weather, loosened snow, water falling down around the stones. Us heard command in that. Praise for Joan Houlihan’s new book of poems: The Us is like nothing I have ever read or seen. These poems are just extraordinary: wildly hewn, classically construed and skewed by an imagined lexicon. . . . In a voice that is elemental ancient, animistic, pre-lingual even, the speaker manages, with nothing short of magic, to communicate . . . in a language both syntactically inventive and radically simple.—Lucie Brock-Broido And for Houlihan’s previous books: . . . These rich, dense poems have a magical realist quality in which the objects and occasions of the everyday are transfigured into talismans brimming with meaning and contained yet powerful emotion.… a unique and vital voice in contemporary American poetry.—Reginald Shepherd . . . an impressive control of prosody and an arch yet tender sensibility throughout, often distilling perceptions of the physical world into exacting, resonant imagery. . . .—Boston Review Tupelo Press |