Lucky Fish

Poetry. Asian American Studies. Winner of the 2011 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for Excellence in Independent Publishing. LUCKY FISH travels along a lush current—a confluence of leaping vocabulary and startling formal variety, with upwelling gratitude at its source: for love, motherhood, "new hope," and the fluid and rich possibilities of words themselves. With an exuberant appetite for "my morning song, my scurry-step, my dew," anchored in complicated human situations, this astounding young poet's third collection of poems is her strongest yet.

Author City: FREDONIA, NY USA

Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of LUCKY FISH (2011); AT THE DRIVE-IN VOLCANO (2007), winner of the Balcones Prize; and MIRACLE FRUIT (2003), winner of the Tupelo Press Prize, the ForeWord Magazine Book of the Year Award in poetry, and the Global Filipino Award. Her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized and have appeared in Prairie Schooner, Black Warrior Review, FIELD, Mid-American Review, and Tin House. Aimee was awarded a 2009 fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, has twice served as a faculty member at the Kundiman retreat for Asian-American writers and has given readings and workshops from Amsterdam to San Francisco. She is associate professor of English at State University of New York-Fredonia, where she is a recipient of the campus-wide Hagan Young Scholar Award and the SUNY Chancellor's Medal for Scholarly and Creative Activities. She lives with her husband and two young sons.

Reviews and Other Links
author site
Dana Jennings @ The New York Times
Jack Dwyer @ Ron Slate's On the Seawall
Rigoberto González @ Harriet the Blog
Winner of the 2011 Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for Excellence in Independent Publishing
interview by Roxane Gay @ HTMLGIANT
Marcus Myers @ NewPages
Rita Dove's List of Young Poets to Watch @ Bill Moyers & Company

“Nezhukumatathil’s third book is fascinated with the small mechanisms of being, whether natural, personal, or imagined. Everything from eating eels in the Ozark mountains to the history of red dye finds a rich life in her poems. At times her lush settings and small stories are reminiscent of fairy tales, while at others Nezhukumatathil speaks with resonance and fierceness. Even as the poems jump from the Philippines to India to New York, they still take their time, stopping to notice that ‘there is no mystery on water/ greater than the absence of rust,’ and to draw small but wonderful parallels.”
—Publishers Weekly

“A farmer is devoured by a flower in one of the many beguiling poems of LUCKY FISH. This is the sensation I often had reading Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s wonderful new collection—that of being immersed in a limber intelligence. Rooted in the terrains of culture, place, and parenthood, and buoyed by inventive language that is joyous and sincere, LUCKY FISH is a book of copious heart and imagination. How wonderful to watch a writer who was already among the best young poets get even better!”
—Terrance Hayes

“Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s latest collection of fanciful and carefully wrought poems are once again far-reaching in geographic scope and linguistic imagination. Here is a poet willing to praise the earth, the animals, the ‘mud and its confusion,’ as well as the human ‘sleep-sloppy mouths.’ These are sensual dreamscapes of allegory and fable, but with a righteous bite and the razor sting of perception, LUCKY FISH is alive with the poet writing well and passionately in a world she cares deeply about.”
—Dorianne Laux

“The sense of wonder in Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s poetry has the quality of a cool breeze on a hot day. These poems convey affection for and passionate involvement with the world. ‘I want to always know the brightness/of a gumball,’ she writes, and I believe her, believe she wants and is capable of such luster, such innocence.”
—Bob Hicok

“In LUCKY FISH, a reader will encounter new words used together in original ways, new perspectives wound around each other—once, twice, three times—in enlightening combinations, and new music, new sounds, new rhythms presented in a clear, searching, and engaging voice. Aimee Nezhukumatahil’s poems create a captivating world of culture, family, and the earth. Enter, explore, and enjoy.”
—Pattiann Rogers

Lucky Fish

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Publisher: Tupelo Press

PubDate: 1/15/2011

ISBN: 9781932195583

Binding: PAPERBACK

Price: $16.95

Quantity Available: 45

Pages: 78

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