Fountain and Furnace

by Hadara Bar-Nadav

$12.95

“A bracing pruning of form down to its minimalist essence… sometimes speaking as the object, sometimes to the object, and sometimes transubstantiating, perhaps to something like the voice of a god.”
— Peter Stitt

Format: paperback

Reader’s Companion Available!  Tupelo Press is pleased to provide the Fountain and Furnace Reader’s Companion in free, downloadable PDF format. (200k)

ISBN: 978-1-936797-61-5 Categories: , Tag:

Winner of the Sunken Garden Poetry Award, selected by Peter Stitt

We fill our days with matter and clutter, objects that might disappear inside their particular and necessary function: soap, a wineglass, nightgown, or thumb. Do we truly think about what the bedroom door has witnessed? Or the fountain, with its sculpture of a boy standing naked in a city square? Like Francis Ponge, Gertrude Stein, Seamus Heaney, and Pablo Neruda, Bar-Nadav makes a poetic investigation of objects to illuminate their visceral and playful potential in our lives.

“The hyper-focused intimacy of the exquisite poems in Fountain and Furnace shapeshift and plumb beautifully deep. The simple objects of Bar-Nadav’s titles become layered with vivid shadows and sad strangeness.… exactness charges the invisible—the marvelous strata underneath the outward—with fierceness and loss and sensuality.”
— Alex Lemon, author of The Wish Book and Happy: A Memoir

“A bracing pruning of form down to its minimalist essence, a sharp knife trimming away dead branches. The point of view is always shifting, sometimes speaking as the object, sometimes to the object, and sometimes transubstantiating, perhaps to something like the voice of a god.”
— Peter Stitt, author of The Perfect Life and judge for the Sunken Garden Poetry Award

Click here for free downloadable Fountain and Furnace Reader’s Companion  (200k)

Hadara Bar-NadavHadara Bar-Nadav is also the author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign) (Saturnalia, 2013), The Frame Called Ruin (New Issues, 2012), and A Glass of Milk to Kiss Goodnight (Margie/Intuit House, 2007). She is also co-author of a best-selling textbook, Writing Poems (Longman, 8th edition). She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

Additional information

Weight .4 lbs
Dimensions 6 × .5 × 9 in
Format

Paperback

Excerpt

from Cradle

There’s the ark
in miniature.

There’s the vacant
nest in the basement.

Honey-colored limbs,
a fine skeleton, pine.

The elephant and giraffe
plucked out their eyes.

A monkey gutted
himself of clouds.

Turtles fail to circulate,
battery acid caked
beneath their shells.

The stillness and
the stillness.

Download the free reader’s companion here.