My Body by Joan Larkin

My Body

New and Selected Poems

Joan Larkin

For nearly 40 years, Joan Larkin has written poems that stake out a territory of relentless self-examination, taking on love and death, family and sexuality in a voice that is unsentimental, ruthless and clear-eyed….My Body: New and Selected Poems gathers generous samplings from Larkin s three previous collections, as well as a substantial array of new material. It s a remarkable statement, tracing the evolution of a poet from her earliest efforts( My mother gave me a bitter tongue. / My father gave me a turned back, she begins Rhyme of My Inheritance ) to the stunning sweep and simplicity of her current work. I m older than my father when he turned/ bright gold and left his body with its used-up liver/ in the Faulkner Hospital, Jamaica Plain, Larkin writes in Afterlife. Best of all is the transcendent Blackout Sonnets, a sonnet crown (seven linked sonnets, joined by repeating first and last lines), which originally appeared in her 1986 book, A Long Sound. I drank anything and slept with everyone, she acknowledges, kept my mouth shut about the abortion. This poetry without pity, in which despair leads not to degradation but to a kind of grace. –Los Angeles Times Review, April 15, 2007, David L. Ulin

While Joan Larkin’s reputation as a poet extends well beyond the gay and lesbian community, her work has been published and nurtured by the small presses in the gay and lesbian community over the past thirty odd years….MY BODY: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS gathers Larkin’s newest poems with selections from three of her earlier books….Her new poems are expansive in the subject matter and their location in time and place, but they are grounded in the things that make poetry strong: images, new and startling observations like the consistence of a person’s ashes and the excavation of significant relationships–families, caregivers, lovers, and friends. Alone the new poems of MY BODY are bound to delight readers…. MY BODY is an important collection of Larkin’s work for both lovers of poetry and devotees of lesbian literature. It is also an important reminder of the significance of our independent presses in nurturing and developing the literary talent in LGBT communities. –Lambda Literary Report, summer 2007, page 25

Product Description

‘Joan Larkin’s hire-wire poetic acts unite both electric tension and stead-fast balance. Deft, probing language surges in these poems, to the music of free verse, metric invention, high rhetoric, & demonic wit. She needs all these, to reach the full range of felt life she intends for us.’ -Marie Ponsot

‘Joan Larkin knows how to write a crown of sonnets so vividly revelatory that it gave this reader goosebumps. Death from AIDS, family deaths, a suicide – dark subjects deftly and honorably portrayed.’ -Maxine Kumin

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