Description
Poetry. "The poems in Paula Cisewski's THE THREATENED EVERYTHING take on a teetering, siren-infused world in which 'bullets rip through every modern poem,' and the speaker, like the rest of us, is 'always and forever / on a stairway to a stairway to,' stuck between floors and phrases like an infinitely skipping record. This book is both urban and animal. It inhabits the political realm and a panicked interiority, the elegiac ('This elegy / is for who one man / in a repeating // mirror of men might have been / before violence') and a newlywed bliss that borders on the hysterical ('happy / as a warehouse stuffed with // white umbrellas popped open!'). I am delighted by Cisewski's formal virtuosity and her feverish humor, and I'm scared to death—as one should be—by the accuracy of her apocalypse. 'We gravel-knee our motherland,' she writes. 'We are patriots, Sisters and Brothers, and our country's flag is a gaping beak.' This book's arrival is imperative, urgent. It burns."—Diane Seuss
Author Bio
Paula Cisewski's fourth poetry collection, Quitter?, co-won Diode Editions' 2016 Book Prize and her third, THE THREATENED EVERYTHING, was the finalist selected for publication in the 2014 Burnside Review Book Contest. Both appeared in early 2017. Cisewski is also the author of GHOST FARGO (Nightboat Books, 2010, selected by Franz Wright for the Nightboat Poetry Prize), UPON ARRIVAL (Black Ocean, 2006), and a chapbook of lyric prose, Misplaced Sinister (Red Bird Chapbooks).
Author City: MINNEAPOLIS, MN USA