Incarnadine
Poems
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4.0 • 4 Ratings
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry
* An NPR, Slate, Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Willamette Week, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013 *
In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning—for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America's most ambitious poets.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this highly anticipated second book from Szybist (Granted), love poetry and poetry of religious faith blend and blur into one transcendent, humbled substance, in which a beloved is asked, "Just for this evening, won't you put me before you/ until I'm far enough away you can/ believe in me?" Also blended and blurred are the biblical and the contemporary, the divine and the self, as in "Update on Mary," a quiet pun on the author's name and that of her namesake, in which "It is not uncommon to find Mary falling asleep on her yoga mat when she has barely begun to stretch." "Annunciation" poems spread throughout the book discover god in all sorts of unlikely places, such as beneath the clothes of a cross-dressing man: "And when I learned that he was not a man / Bullwhip, horsewhip, unzip, I could have crawled/ Through thorn and bee." Finally, though, whether or not readers are attuned to the religious content, these are gorgeous lyrics, in traditional and invented forms one poem is a diagrammed sentence while another radiates from an empty space at the center of the page which create close encounters with not-quite-paraphrasable truths. This is essential poetry
