Dresses from the Old Country - (American Poets Continuum) by Laura Read (Paperback)
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<p/><br></br><p><b> About the Book </b></p></br></br>A lyric reflection on a continually unfolding life by the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA.<p/><br></br><p><b> Book Synopsis </b></p></br></br>In Laura Read's second poetry collection, the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA, weaves past and present together to create a portrait of a life in progress. As the speaker looks back on her life, she exists simultaneously as all the selves she has ever been: a lost child, a lonely adolescent, a teacher, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a mother--a woman continually shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. Deeply rooted in a particular time and place, Read's poems strip away the illusion of the passage of time as they reveal how we are all wearing "dresses from the old country."<p/><br></br><p><b> Review Quotes </b></p></br></br><br>"No one can deliver a deadly and disarmingly frank line like Laura Read, whose nostalgia and memory for high school jobs at Taco Time and green eyeliner and childhood (her own and her sons') and learning (her own and her students') is as barbed as it is brilliant. This is one of the most beautiful and wickedly true collections I've read in ages, and it reminded me of how rare it is to find someone who writes 'a true sentence, the one you finally say.'" -Alexandra Teague <p/> "Laura Read is one of the great love poets of our age - her love is wide and searching, generous and demanding. She offers the fullness, complexity, and yearning of a daughter's, wife's, mother's and lover's feelings. Fully human and deeply nuanced, Read's poems propose a vision of love that is generous, abundant, and self-sacrificing, but also these speakers will be damned if a woman offering so much of herself will be ignored or erased. This is a beautiful collection that envisions the end of muses and imagines what reciprocal and empowered devotion might make possible." -Kathryn Nuernberger <br> "'I knew I had to go back under, ' writes Laura Read, as she dives once again into the night-black waters of the opening poem of her second full-length collection, <i>Dresses from the Old Country.</i> 'Someone was down there / who had to be saved.' And who drifts in depths? Who requires rescue? The dreamy, desirous girl the poet once was? The sweet, sad, sometimes wicked woman she is? An old, ridiculous boyfriend? Her son grown so suddenly into a man? I'll tell you, reader, I think it's us--you and me. Truly, I haven't been so knocked out, so heart-struck by a book of poems in a good long while. 'No one told me this about love, ' Read writes, near the end of this astonishing collection, and I think, Me neither, me neither! Until now, at least." --Joe Wilkins, author of <i>The Mountain and the Fathers</i> and <i>When We Were Birds</i><br><p/><br></br><p><b> About the Author </b></p></br></br>Laura Read was born in New York City and has lived most of her life in Spokane, WA. She is the author of <i>Dresses from the Old Country</i> (BOA Editions, 2018), <i>Instructions for My Mother's Funeral</i> (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry), and the chapbook <i>The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You</i> (winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). A recipient of a Washington State Artists Trust Grant, a Florida Review Prize for Poetry, and the Crab Creek Review Prize for Poetry, Laura presents regularly at literary festivals and conferences throughout the Northwest, including GetLit!, Write on the Sound, Litfuse, and the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Laura served as Spokane's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, and she currently teaches at Spokane Falls Community College.
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