In this Book
- Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral
- Book
- 2012
- Published by: University of Pittsburgh Press
- Series: Pitt Poetry Series
summary
This collection is divided into three sections. The first opens with the speaker’s reflections on her childhood loss of her father and subsequent move to a new house and a new life, a life in which she is always alert to the absences and danger but also a life in which she begins to see language as a kind of salvation. This section also develops the speaker’s first knowledge of sex, primarily in the poems, “The Goose Girl” and “A Woman Was Raped Here.” The second section follows the speaker into adolescence and young adulthood, and these poems further explore the sexual violence in the world in which the speaker lives, and how this violence affects her own feelings toward sex and romantic love. In the third section, the book finds love, work, and family, and the poems in this section about motherhood echo back to the first section as the speaker’s own parenting is influenced by how difficult it is to love when you know people die.
Table of Contents
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- Part I
- Coney Island, 1977
- pp. 9-10
- The Goose Girl
- pp. 14-15
- Penny Poker
- p. 16
- May 18, 1980
- pp. 17-18
- When She Married Him
- p. 19
- “A Woman Was Raped Here”
- pp. 20-21
- Ars Poetica
- pp. 27-28
- Part II
- The Deaf Girls
- p. 31
- Hide and Seek
- pp. 32-33
- Donut Parade
- pp. 34-35
- Muddy Waters
- p. 38
- Salt of the Earth
- pp. 41-42
- In Paris Women Walk in the Dark
- pp. 47-48
- The Big Dipper
- p. 50
- The Flower Horses
- p. 53
- Paper Clothes
- p. 54
- Watching Oksana
- pp. 55-56
- Part III
- Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral
- pp. 61-62
- Long Distance
- pp. 63-64
- You Flew across the Map
- pp. 65-66
- For the Bible Tells Me So
- pp. 67-68
- Something about Winning
- pp. 69-70
- Community College
- pp. 71-72
- The Little Mermaid, the Long Version
- pp. 73-74
- How to Be Sad
- p. 78
- About a Baby
- pp. 84-85
- Trying to Contact Neil Diamond
- pp. 86-88
- Acknowledgments
- pp. 89-90
Additional Information
ISBN
9780822978442
Related ISBN(s)
9780822962151
MARC Record
OCLC
835768870
Pages
101
Launched on MUSE
2013-01-01
Language
English
Open Access
No