Bøger af Adrian Blevins

Winner of the 2016 Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize."When you're lucky enough to get your hands on a book of poems this alive, everything you say about it feels like an understatement. Yes, Appalachians Run Amok is utterly original, wild yet tight, feisty, vibrant, combustible. Yes, it's bursting with keen-eyed tenderness and unshushable attitude. Yes, the poems' startling emotional intelligence blends with myriad other intelligences (e.g. maternal, earthy, topical, humane, etc.) to create this voice, "all hot and giddy." A proud daughter of Appalachia, Blevins gifts us with vivid glimpses of where she came of age. Reading her beautiful, linguistically limber, cascading descriptions is like shooting the rapids with an expert river rider at the helm." --Amy Gerstler

A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins' oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience. These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states. Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict. If marriage "was a rope across a twilight abyss (an abscess)," if aging brings the hateful labels "OUT OF ORDER / & LATE FEE," every disappointment uncovers rejuvenating clarity. "Bereavement status" engenders both heartbreak and hope, somehow, as "then you lose your losses." Blevins triumphs in her reclamation of the spectacular in the mundane. "America is a flub. // A hack. A crime! America, fuck you for making // despondent bandits of us -- / for blinding & hooding // & chaining & gagging us." Even perched on shifting tectonic plates, Blevins wins the last word: "You don't seem to know it, // but there are foxes / crossing meadows // out there fast as disco lights. There are loons on your lakes." Amen.

Molten and musical poetry from an acclaimed Southern writer