The End of Pink: Poems (American Poets Continuum) - Tapa blanda

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award "The remarkable designs of a landscape created by Kathryn Nuernberger give us such a stamp of hoof, wonder, and wit--so much wisdom and understanding of what it means to truly fling your body into the world. This is an unforgettable collection of sly-sexy poems of desire, grief, and motherhood, finally offering up the 'truth of it, the refracted light and blooming anemones of it, the red / coral and unfurling starfish of it.' But perhaps the greatest gift from The End of Pink is the insistence of 'how very emerald joy is, how very leafed with lapis and gilding'--a passionate aide-memoire to hold off a surrender to the dark." --Aimee Nezhukumatathil "I love the ways in which The End of Pink confronts the idea of wisdom, and deftly deconstructs it. When is fable and myth more accurate than science? When does graybearded public authority submit to the wisdom of messy, private experience? How does the wisdom of the book measure up against the wisdom of the body--the female body especially? What do we do when our everyday language fails to represent reality? Poetry, of course, is the answer to this last question, and it is the poetry of Kathryn Nuernberger in particular that makes a place for us in our uncertainty. Not a safe place, not a place of comfort, but a place of surreal, dark beauty that knows us all the same." --Nicky Beer "This a collection of extraordinary resolve, a book that works through emotional turmoil with a steadfast earnestness that resists privatizing pain at the same time it refuses to make something clever or ostentatious with it. The result is a refreshing innovation on the confessional that reads as easily as a conversation with a friend over a drink while still surprising us with new connections, illuminations, and affecting enactments of psychological healing." -- NewPages

Winner of the 2015 James Laughlin Award, Kathryn Nuernberger's The End of Pink is populated by strange characters--Bat Boy, automatons, taxidermied mermaids, snake oil salesmen, and Benjamin Franklin--all from the annals of science and pseudoscience. Equal parts fact and folklore, these poems look to the marvelous and the weird for a way to understand childbirth, parenthood, sickness, death, and--of course--joy. Finding myself in a mesmeric orientation, before me appeared Benjamin Franklin, who magnetized his French paramours at dinner parties as an amusing diversion from his most serious studies of electricity and the ethereal fire. I like thinking about how he would have stood on tiptoe to kiss their buzzing lips and everyone would gasp and clap for the blue spark between them. I believe in an honest and forthright manner, a democracy of plain speech, so I have to find a way to explain I don't care to have sex anymore. Kathryn Nuernberger has lived in various corners of Missouri, Louisiana, Ohio, and Montana. Her first book, Rag & Bone (Elixir Press, 2011), was a love letter to backwoods junk collectors and all of the abandoned cabins in the foothills to the Ozark Mountains. An unapologetic dilettante, she has received research fellowships from the American Antiquarian Society and The Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life to research aspects of the history of science and medicine. She currently lives in Columbia, Missouri, teaches at the University of Central Missouri, and serves as the director of Pleiades Press.