settler

Name: settler
SKU: 978-1-946482-63-1
Price: 15.95 USD
Availability: OutOfStock

by Maggie Queeney

$15.95

“Settler began haunting me while I was reading it for the first time, so that as soon as I finished it I wanted to read it over again. Maggie Queeney has captured so much human experience in such a small space— and in that small space, in even smaller spaces, sonnet by sonnet— and my admiration for the book, in particular for its taut clarity, from which its power to haunt derives, only increases each time I read it.”

—Shane McCrae, author of The Gilded Auction Block: Poems

Format: paperback
Published: December 2021

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ISBN: 978-1-946482-63-1 Category: Poetry Tag: Lesson Plan

“To live inside Maggie Queeney’s settler is to be unraveled, bewitched, drawn back to the wonders of words and what we invent with them. In the words of Diane Seuss, “There is something to be said for a boundary. There is also something to be said for an unbinding.” Through the poems’ collective speaker, the reader is implied and thus invited to turn and return with Queeney, backward toward reverberations of grief and the genesis of language, forward toward birth and reinvention, “The scream of the new voice / invading the old room.” These are holy sonnets for a new generation—Queeney reimagines form, challenging staid ideas of confinement, to gaze toward an edgy horizon, marveling at the sanctity of making, of language, of the human body, of pleasure and pain, of animal and earth.”

— Jenny Molberg, author of Marvels of the Invisible and Refusal: Poems

These fourteen-line poems give voice to the individual and collective experiences of women. They are windows into a stark otherworld, one filled with the raw materials of experience: sex, birth, cloth, pain. Spare and strange beauty marks the lives and worlds of these women, defined by their struggle for survival in the physical and psychological captivity of the domestic realm. The speaker moves between the singular and plural, sounding out the overlapping experiences of women as both subject and object of the domination inherent in settler colonialism.

Maggie Queeney is a writer, visual artist, and educator. Recipient of the 2019 Stanley Kunitz Memorial Prize, The Ruth Stone Scholarship, and a 2019 Individual Artists Program Grant from the City of Chicago, her recent work can be found in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Colorado Review, and American Poetry Review, among others. She reads and writes in Chicago, where she was born.