Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 4
Description
Floodgate Poetry Series Vol. 4 collects three chapbooks in a single volume: Regina DiPerna's A Map of Veins, Ryan Teitman's Jesuits, and Paisley Rekdal's Philomela.
Regina DiPerna's first collection of poems, A Map of Veins, tells the story of the death of a lover and her healing process. In these elegies, DiPerna faces the guilt of finding new love, death taunts her years after the fact with postcards and gifts, and memory haunts her dreams.
Jesuits, Ryan Teitman's second collection, explores childhood, fatherhood, and the holy spirit in rich lyrical verse and prose. In often surreal poetry and prose, Teitman's mother appears as a curtain in the window, he wears a shadow for a suit, and plays on the train tracks with a child version of his father.
Paisley Rekdal's fourth collection of poetry, Philomela, unabashedly parallels the myth of Philomela with her own experience with violent sexual assault in a combination of verse and lyric essay. In these brave, somewhat experimental verses, Rekdal challenges the definitions of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape as she parses out her own experiences with them.
It's the fourth volume in the Floodgate Poetry Series, edited by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum. Chapbooks--short books under 40 pages--arose when printed books became affordable in the 16th century. The series is in the tradition of 18th and 19th century British and American literary annuals, and the Penguin Modern Poets Series of the 1960s and '70s.
Product Details
| Publisher | Upper Rubber Boot Books |
| Publish Date | February 27, 2018 |
| Pages | 120 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781937794842 |
| Dimensions | 9.0 X 6.0 X 0.3 inches | 0.4 pounds |
Reviews
Regina Diperna's A Map of Veins begins with the photograph of a dead lover and a decomposing body. What "will he become?" the speaker asks, and in this moving sequence of elegies the lost lover is transmuted into a map--a landscape. In these intimate and ardent poems, absence is prismatic, refracted through our wide and everyday world. It lingers in a slack leather belt, the skin of a mango, and "a fortune // told in fallen leaves across / a swimming pool." Through dream, memory, and the careful laying of words, we are granted access to the secret and trembling lives of artifacts. Ultimately, the lover revives circuitously through the earth itself, through "an animal's expelled breath." And through the breath that has expelled these stunning poems.--Adam Giannelli, author of Tremulous Hinge
Every moment of Ryan Teitman's Jesuits feels like elegy, like tribute--not only to a father but to a life that is impossible to hold "in place/ like a specimen slide." In shapely lines, Teitman twists and troubles syntax to bring these dreams into the waking world. There is a gauze, a film, present in these poems--"light is/ thin, and clothes us/ like linen," "a mosquito net/ of stars settles/ over town," and "the dark is pulled/ back like a sheet/ covering a body"--but the experience feels immediate, never diffused. Jesuits hit me in the gut. I'll go back to these poems again and again. --Maggie Smith, author of Good Bones
"Sleep was a country / to retire to, an Ecuador" writes Ryan Teitman. Apt phrasing, as one could spend several evenings vacationing in the steam that rises from these well-wrought pages--part wistful noir, part mystic incense ("bluebottle, peat") emanating from a thurible. Jesuits is the work of a master craftsman, wherein family, fable, faith, and form cohabitate to create art as anodyne. Holy moly are these poems dreamy, healing. --Marcus Wicker, author of Silencer and Maybe the Saddest Thing
Compelling, appealing, cinematic . . . Rekdal refreshes the meaning and the image of being displaced in this world.--The Boston Globe, on her book, Imaginary Vessels
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