✨ Limited-edition offer in honor of Ada Limón and The Carrying ! Give a donation of $25 or more to...
Uncoded Woman
Coding and decoding are threads running through the poems of Uncoded Woman, which together tell the story of a woman named Bead and her search for safe harbor.
“LN1: You Should Proceed with Caution.” “D: Keep Clear of Me: I Am Maneuvering with Difficulty.” “YZ: The Words Which Follow Are in Plain Language.” The maritime International Code of Signals—a dictionary of ship’s pennants and the message they convey—becomes a symbolic guide to Bead’s journey, as she learns that some signs mislead while others illuminate. Along the way, the beautiful terrain near Lake Michigan forms a powerful backdrop to Bead’s life with Barn, her Native American boyfriend, whose struggles are in stark contrast to the wealthy resort community around them.
From exhilaration to degradation, from betrayal to self-reliance, Anne-Marie Oomen’s poems give voice to a woman’s life on the edge.
ISBN:
978-1-57131-425-3 Publish Date:
11/29/2006
Pages:
88
Size:
6 × 9 × 0.44 in
Weight:
4.8 oz
Like this book? Sign up for occasional updates
Praise and Prizes
“Lively . . . At times dreamily beautiful . . . Uncoded Woman is a fine example of the kind of collection that gains in its accumulation.”
Chicago Sun-Times
“A powerful mediation on women, poverty, and the destructive nature of secrets; it rewards attentive readers with an experience rich in language and transformation.”
Cold Front Magazine
“Anne-Marie Oomen’s strong character, iconoclastic language, and suspenseful plotting will satisfy dual desires for the grace of poetry and the immersion of the novel.”
Foreword Reviews
“Raw, captivating . . . Uncoded Woman is at once a compelling story of a symbolic search for safe harbor and a powerful poetic rendition of life’s hidden gems surfacing from a harsh world honestly encountered.”
KLIATT
“Earthy and vernacular, yet the verse is nothing short of virtuosic.”
Feminist Review
You Might Enjoy
Based on this book, we recommend you try…
This National Poetry Series winner is an unflinching portrait of the actual west—full of beauty as well as brutality, where boys tentatively learn to become, and to love, men. Its landscapes are ravaged but also startlingly lush, and even its...
This is a collection about time—about memory, and remembrance, and how the past makes itself manifest in the world. A desk, a mailbox, a house delivering its own autobiography: in these poems, objects hold history, even if they’ve grown...
In March 2011, a tsunami caused by an earthquake collided with nearby power plant Fukushima Daiichi, causing the only nuclear disaster in history to rival Chernobyl in scope. These poems take a piercing, witty, and ferocious look into the heart...
This winner of the Max Ritvo Poetry Prize is an elegant debut that searches widely to ask what it means to exist in a state of loss. These are poems of frequent swerves and transformations, in dialogue with science, geography, art, and aesthetics...