In this Book
- The Messenger
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: University of Iowa Press
- Series: Iowa Poetry Prize
summary
In thrilling poems of metamorphosis and birth, death and dissolution, Stephanie Pippin’s debut collection returns us to a world unshorn of wildness. Delivering accident and hunger, love and grief, nature in these poems is beautiful and brutal, “a hellish magnificence” that both invites and denies the meanings we project onto it. Refusing the domesticated comfort of our usual myths, Pippin reminds us of our place as creatures among others in a world where “what isn’t dead / is dying,” and where the thrill of predatory flight commingles with the desperation of the prey.
This mesmerizing and astonishingly assured collection offers a message as harrowing as it is essential. Faced with the hard master of necessity—“angel stinking of his own / excitement”—and bare before what Mallarmé called “the horror of the forest,” we are helpless, finally, to do anything to save what we love. Our sole task, these poems insist, is to look on while we can, and to love harder. Table of Contents
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- Title Page, Copyright
- pp. i-viii
- Afterimage
- pp. 1-16
- The Messenger
- pp. 2-17
- King Vulture
- pp. 3-18
- Meteor Shower Peaks
- pp. 5-20
- Open Season
- pp. 15-30
- Brazil, 1832
- pp. 24-25
- The Peregrine
- pp. 26-41
- Diving Horse
- pp. 28-43
- Homecoming
- pp. 29-30
- Iron Bridge
- pp. 32-47
- Riverlands
- pp. 37-52
- What I Wanted
- pp. 38-53
- Propagation
- pp. 46-61
- Candling Eggs
- pp. 51-52
Additional Information
ISBN
9781609381653
Related ISBN(s)
9781609381646
MARC Record
OCLC
835140651
Pages
70
Launched on MUSE
2013-05-20
Language
English
Open Access
No
Copyright
2013