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The University of Akron

2010

Poetry

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The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems Of The Magdalen Laundries Of Ireland, Rachel Dilworth Dec 2010

The Wild Rose Asylum: Poems Of The Magdalen Laundries Of Ireland, Rachel Dilworth

University of Akron Press Publications

The poems of The Wild Rose Asylum offer a multi-faceted consideration of the historical phenomenon of Ireland’s Magdalen asylums, the largest and most controversial of which were run for 150 years, until 1996, by the Catholic Church. In poems that embrace both traditional and experimental forms, Rachel Dilworth’s work explores complex factors involved in the loss by thousands of Irish women of years of their lives, numerous aspects of their identities, and countless future possibilities to confinement and arduous unpaid laundry labor as “penitents” in these facilities for so-called “fallen” women. Pervaded by a cutting awareness of an incarceration of …


Orphan, Indiana, David Dodd Lee Nov 2010

Orphan, Indiana, David Dodd Lee

University of Akron Press Publications

Orphan, Indiana is a collection of spontaneous outbursts framed by reticence and the guiding mania of the subconscious. Profane and poignant, accidental-seeming but soaring with satirical intent, David Dodd Lee's poems capture a verisimilitude that's phenomenological, and yet of the moment.


Nothing Fatal, Sarah Perrier Oct 2010

Nothing Fatal, Sarah Perrier

University of Akron Press Publications

What happens when love is replaced by romance? In Nothing Fatal, Sarah Perrier explores this and other questions about our contemporary understanding of dating, relationships, sex, and marriage. In the opening lines of “Too Darn Hot,” a poem fueled by the same weary ardor as Cole Porter’s song, the speaker asks, “Why sort the doubletalk from the innuendo? / They’re both lyrical.” Rather than sorting the one from the other, the poems of Nothing Fatal delight in the ways that the imperfect and seductive power of language has, for centuries, helped us find new and inventive ways to woo …


Requiem For The Orchard, Oliver De La Paz Feb 2010

Requiem For The Orchard, Oliver De La Paz

University of Akron Press Publications

These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place “where the Ferris Wheel/ was the tallest thing in the valley,” where a boy would learn “to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken’s neck/ with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.” Looking back, the poet wrestles with the meaning of labor in the apple orchards and “the filthy dollars we’d wad into our pockets,” or the rites of passage that included sinking a knife into the flank of a dead chestnut horse. In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties—or …