Full Description
A Wake with Nine Shades is an exploration of grief and culpability, a Dantean descent through contemporary midlife crisis. Populated by ghosts and children, lovers and amputations, bodies of water, insomnia, debt and domestic violence, Steinorth measures what is broken against the white space of the page, paying homage to the Great Lakes and snowscapes her poems inhabit and the vacancies, denials, and drains they circle. Formally inventive and musically obsessive, the book's unconventional formal construction and lyric wit contribute what Eleanor Wilner deems the essential "Lightness" described by Italo Calvino, noting Steinorth's "ability to treat weighty subjects with a mastery of style . . . a liveliness of imagination and intelligence that lightens, without denial, what would otherwise be unbearable. . . ."
Contents
Self-Portrait with Perennial Shade
Wake: A Sleep in Forty-Something Winks
Shoveling
Infernal coo i
C o m m u t e
P a r a d i g m
w i n k
While We Are Reefing Down the Main with Waves at Twelve Feet
and the Kids Are Losing their Lunch and the Dinghy Breaks Free
Plow Man
Dear Robber
Lines Writ on the Backside of a Dozer Invoice
w i n k
Absolute Power
Infernal coo ii
Pissed
w i n k
Wake: A Week Without Weather
Below The Dam
w i n k
E y e
w i n k
In the Shower
E v e
Infernal coo iii
Cross-country Meet
Gasoline Finger Reek
Infernal coo iv
About Face
The Wake Again
w i n k
Infernal Coo v
w i n k
G O D D O G D O G G O D G O D D O G D O G G O D G O D D O G
If An Apple Were A Ravine
\ /
A Triste Little Tryst w/R. Frost, select billets-doux
\ /
x
N o t a Confession
Infernal coo vi
Night Apartment
Blizzard
Aroma Therapy
Infernal coo vii
R-O-T-A-R-Y
w i n k
D e a r Collar
Ordinary Sheers
Infernal coo viii
Wake in the Woods
w i n k
This Side of the Fair Grounds
What If We Wake Up Dead
Wake & Island
w i n k
R a n ge
L i l y Wakes
B l u e Bird
Lullaby for T e n o r
Infernal coo ix
A Door
w i n k
Notes
Acknowledgments
