
But a Storm Is Blowing from Paradise
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram
(Author)Description
Product Details
Publisher | Red Hen Press |
Publish Date | March 01, 2012 |
Pages | 104 |
Language | English |
Type | |
EAN/UPC | 9781597091688 |
Dimensions | 8.7 X 5.9 X 0.6 inches | 0.3 pounds |
About the Author
Lillian-Yvonne Bertram has been a Bread Loaf Writers' Conference scholarship winner, a Cave Canem fellow, and a writer-in-residence at the Montana Artists' Refuge. Her poetry has appeared in the Harvard Review, the Mid-American Review, the Indiana Review, and other journals. She received second place in Narrative Magazine's poetry contest and has won Gulf Coast Magazine's Donald Barthelme Prize for Short Prose. Bertram is a graduate of the writing programs at Carnegie Mellon and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is currently a Gaius Charles Bolin Fellow at Williams College. Her first book, But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise, won Red Hen Press's 2010 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, judged by Claudia Rankine.
Reviews
"What's a storm doing in Paradise to begin with? I blame the Poet. And why's it blowing this way? I blame Bertram. Radiowoman's got 'jukebox growth' up and down the dial, hitting frequencies high and low. What's that you say, Barking Dog? 'Inferior & menstrus'? Ha. Storm blowing this way is a book of smart songs that part the curtains of Paradise. Storm blowing this way, hip to brain, is a poet you'll be reading for years. 'O thuggish awakening'? Bring it on."--Steve Davenport, author of Uncontainable Noise
"Lillian-Yvonne Bertram's But a Storm is Blowing From Paradise is an offering to those of us for whom normalcy is the constant shift between a sense of location and dislocation. The shrewdness of these poems accumulates into a critique of our American desires and failures. The precision of Bertram's lyrical and agile language is born out of the specificity of her gaze on what subliminally feels like a road trip through the towns that make up this country. These unforgettable poems awaken images so masterfully that reading and seeing become one thing: 'We are claimed by middle country/where the river is cooked to steam in the factory belly/& every quivering shadow is missing its father.' This award winning collection is an American portrait in which the poems are themselves, in Bertram's words, 'the elliptical mystery or the grief that walks different on everyone...' It's exhilarating to read poetry that pushes reading into the realm of experience. "--Claudia Rankine, Final Judge, 2010 Benjamin Saltman Award
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