Applies to Oranges

Maureen Thorson

Publisher: Ugly Duckling Presse

PubDate: 3/1/2011

ISBN: 9781933254852

Binding: PAPERBACK

Price: $13.00

Quantity Available: 7

Pages: 72

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Poetry. In APPLIES TO ORANGES, Maureen Thorson's debut full-length collection of poems, oranges, spiders, tourists, and a Zenith television conspire to turn the conventions of narrative on its side. These poems fracture and refract narrative by crafting a story from seemingly absurd symbols whose recursive use defies coherence, but expand the imagination by gradually revealing an anachronistic, nostalgic, and cinematic world. The precision of these poems transforms a simple escapist fantasy into an internalized landscape that reveals both humor and sadness with successive repetition.

Author City: WASHINGTON, DC USA

Maureen Thorson is a poet, publisher, and book designer living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of a number of chapbooks, including Twenty Questions for the Drunken Sailor (Dusie/flynpyntar Press, 2009); Mayport (Poetry Society of America, 2006), which won the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship; and Novelty Act (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004). Her poems can be found in many anthologies and journals, including the forthcoming Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets, EXQUISITE CORPSE, Hotel Amerika, LIT, THE HAT, and 6x6. Maureen is the publisher and editor of Big Game Books, a small press dedicated to emerging poets. She is also the co-curator of the In Your Ear reading series at the DC Arts Center and the founder of NaPoWriMo, an annual project in which poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.

Reviews and Other Links
author site
interview by Kate Greenstreet @ Bookslut
Marcus Myers @ NewPages
Publishers Weekly
Geof Huth @ dbqp: visualizing poetics
Iris Cushing @ BOMBLOG
Matthew Zingg @ The Rumpus
Sara Renee Marshall @ The Volta

“Thorson is an orphaned Victorian trapped in a robot spider who wants badly to sell us madeleines woven of fake hypnotic oranges, but all time has converged in these lines, the astronavigation is cluttered with satellites, her suicidal flower arrangements can’t be decoded, the ‘signal / fail[s], decay[s] into ornament,’ and real grief of lost love and the motion picture clips of it we project onto foreign scenery make us realize that ‘the radio plays / different stations, and you have no radio.’ The commerce of fictional, degenerating visual language and memory confuses us and comforts us as we—as Thorson—wrestle with its insidious, satisfying infestation of our individual and collective experience. This is wonderful, deeply, and superficially felt work.”
—Cathy Eisenhower

“Maureen Thorson’s first full-length book is a necessary satellite signal made of a uniquely singular ache and echo. She deftly performs a precise dissection of heartbreak’s timeless ability to blow open the universe of our lives and allow our fascinating agonies to burst into being. APPLIES TO ORANGES is a collection that is, at once, a mythic tale of loss and a microscopic look into the delicate beauty of broken things. These wonderful poems demand that you linger in their haunting world, and as Thorson says, ‘breathe slowly, if at all.’”
—Ada Limón

“Maureen Thorson’s narrator addresses a former love (who may as well be us) in a series of beautiful sonnetlike pieces that cohere in a sequence like shards in a mosaic—some bits darker, some brighter, each tight. ‘I want to diagram the light that shines out through the holes you pricked in me,’ she says. ‘Instead, I retract into extravagant gestures, diaries, bonfires, the psycho gloss of wilted blossoms, dead-eyed stamens stitched in rows.’ Thorson’s APPLIES TO ORANGES sings and surprises in both new and timeless ways, as love’s decay blooms gorgeously and is borne away by dissipating spiders.”
—Shanna Compton

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