The Nine Senses

The Nine Senses
Poetry

The Nine Senses

“A book to bind us to the world, and to each other.” —SARAH GRIDLEY
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In these exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers.

The questions that have informed much of Kwasny’s previous work—how does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?—find a new urgency in The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal. “Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined it—as resolution of the real and the dream,” Kwasny writes in the title poem.

Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?

ISBN:
9781571314376
Publish Date: 
03/01/2011
Pages: 
112
Size: 
5.5 × 8.5 × 0.25 in
Weight: 
5.9 oz
Author
Melissa Kwasny

Melissa Kwasny is the author of six collections of poems, including PictographReading Novalis in Montana, and The Nine Senses. Kwasny is also the author of Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision, and has edited multiple anthologies, including, with M.L. Smoker, I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights.  Widely published in journals anthologies, her work has appeared in PloughsharesBoston Review, and The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral. 

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