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Parlor Press

Curiosities

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Title: Curiosities
Author: Perham, Brittany
ISBN: 9781602352391
Publisher: Parlor Press
Published: 2011
Binding: Quality
Language: English
Condition: Used: Very Good
Clean, unmarked copy with some edge wear. Good binding. Dust jacket included if issued with one. We ship in recyclable American-made mailers. 100% money-back guarantee on all orders.

B 1369346

Publisher Description:
Brittany Perham's first collection, THE CURIOSITIES, fixes its sure and unsettling gaze on daughters and fathers, sisters and brothers, madness, sickness, longing and love. These poems make up a cabinet of curiosities because they hold what is fascinating or frightening, beautiful or awesome- a "stomach plumed by syringe," a "zoo's lost leopard," a "forest of high-waisted trees"- up to the eye. In their image-making, the poems place language itself beneath the glass slide of a microscope in order to discern its component structures, its natural patterns. Curiosity here is a way of looking-unsatisfiable, looping back on itself, yielding only further questions. In these uncanny and passionate poems our own lives are made strange to us, and we are wonderstruck. WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING: "The poems in The Curiosities make a powerful system, almost an atmosphere out of stories of the body and memories of place. In poem after poem, the speaker is mysterious but never remote; the language is deliberate but never staged. And at all times, the music, intensity and craft of the work bring us close. This is a wonderful debut collection."-EAVAN BOLAND "With curatorial precision and a starling's penchant for multiple threads in both song and shelter, Brittany Perham has fashioned a haven of curiosities captivating to the ear as well as the eye. These poems dream in color and sound: bright, chantant, lifting and lowering the music and the light, so that we are transported from this world into the antechambers of the heart and back again. You cannot re-enter the waking world after reading these lucid, eloquent poems and not feel forever changed."-D. A. POWELL "As with all wunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, it is the quality of the collected wonders that matters. A brother's illness, a family's disintegration and abiding bonds, the odd dignity of children, a teacher's suicide, loss and redemption of a vital love-these old stories, in Brittany Perham's hands, become new. Poems wh