Poetry. "SILKIE, with its historical detail and rich sense of place, beautiful language, startling psychological acuity, is a triumph...a meditation on passion and heartbreak that enthralls and compels with its myth of "the beastly human"--Reginald Gibbons. "Stunning, brave, and original, the poems are full of the sensuality of the body and the longing of the soul, deftly wrought to reveal a world both real and transcendent"--Jesse Lee Kercheval. "Cusac recounts the story of the Silkie, seals who transform into human beings...This is big poetry. Not shimmery self-consciousness. Not ineffable shrines to the quotidian. This poetry is as fundamental as rocks. It shocks with its primordial qualities and thrills with its art"--Patrick Lawler.

Author City: CHICAGO, IL USA

Anne-Marie Cusac is the author of SILKIE (Many Mountains Moving, 2007). Her poetry has appeared in Poetry, Iowa Review, TriQuarterly, The American Scholar, The Madison Review, and Crab Orchard Review. Her first poetry book, The Mean Days (2001) was published by Tia Chucha Press and won the Posner Book Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers. A recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University and a Wisconsin Arts Board Individual Artist's grant, Cusac was for ten years an editor and investigative reporter for The Progressive magazine. Her investigative reporting there won several awards, including the prestigious George Polk Award. She is a professor in Communication at Roosevelt University and a contributing writer for The Progressive. Cruel and Unusual: The Culture of Punishment in America (Yale University Press, 2009) is her new nonfiction book.