Even Shorn - (Linda Bruckheimer Kentucky Literature) by Isabel Duarte-Gray (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>"Milton concludes "Lycidas," his great pastoral elegy, with the sudden appearance of the pastoral elegist, a youth with no audience but trees and running water: "Thus sang the uncouth swain to th'oaks and rills, / While the still morn went out with sandals grey." This moment epitomizes, for me, the Western tradition of pastoral poetry, and of pastoral elegy in particular. My collection began as a series of elegies, written for the many dead of my family, in the historically unremarkable Black Patch region of Western Kentucky. They, like Lycidas, often died with no witness but the natural world. They, like Lycidas, are deeply mourned. But unlike Lycidas, my aunts and uncles do not die innocently and are not naively mourned. The lived experience of the country-of poverty, of agriculture, of intense localit- does not exist outside time. It is cruel. It deserves its brutal elegy. Its songs with teeth"--<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>Even Shorn takes its title from the Song of Solomon and that Book's equation of pastoral feminine beauty with the plenty of harvest. Isabel Duarte-Gray argues that material bounty no longer exists in the rural spaces where she was raised. Duarte-Gray's poetry mines local orature, family history, and folklore for the music of Western Kentucky, creating the sparse line breaks and the harsh syntax of the present. The poems describe quilt patterns with sinister shapes: "a snake's tongue is a trigger finger/Man's tongue pleases no one." Animals proliferate: "One cat became five/five became nine. /Then a flood and ebb/as each moon brought its tide/below the trailer floor..." A grandfather plays drunk, solitary Russian Roulette. A cousin lives in a closet. Duarte's poetry is shocking, whip smart, and truly unique.<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"Isabel Duarte-Gray's book is like no other--a text that 'thinks the spell, ' cut-off tales, callings, sudden leaps in lines 'split in two, ' perhaps like this collection itself, splicing carefully through the belly, the heart and the sternum--animals, wives and husbands. You choose. The more you read, the more you scrape and peel through the night fallen--'sniffing for the temperatures of life.' Isabel Duarte-Gray's grasp of deep and perhaps forbidden vernaculars, cultural edges and crossings is profound. The place is underground, underwater, under the crackling structures and somewhere inside abandoned, formless barns in a far-off crimson. An immediate prize-winner. A bold, brave, rare, genius, meticulous, deeper and deeper at work."<b> <p/>-- Juan Felipe Herrera, Poet Laureate of the United States, Emeritus</b> <p/> "The creeks the tears the patriarchy. The Osage orange the intelligible terror. The tiny towns. The no towns at all. The dragonflies the bones the lilies. The difficult ongoing work of recovery. The marriages the handsewn linens the burials. The excess. The shortage. The fear, and the ways to get past that fear. The lists. The anecdotes. The scenes set and dismantled. The herbals the escapees the strings .The listening. That's what you'll find, and it's far from all you'll find, in this strong first collection, a song of songs, an evidence of evidence, a manifestation from places some of us know and many more of us should hear. I give thanks for it."<b> <p/>--Stephanie Burt, author of <i>Advice from the Lights</i> and <i>The Poet is You</b></i> <p/><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Isabel Duarte-Gray was born in Oakland, California and raised in a trailer in Kuttawa, Kentucky. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at Harvard University, where she studies Latinx Literature, Poetry, and Ecocriticism. She received her B.A. in English and Russian from Amherst College. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in <i>The Colorado Review, Bat City Review, The South Carolina Review, </i> and <i>December</i> magazine, among others.
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