Description
Poetry. Selected by Charles Simic as winner of the eighth annual Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, GUINEVERE IN BALTIMORE comprises a sequence of dramatic monologues in which the infamous lovers Guinevere and Lancelot navigate their doomed affair in our own age of austerity. The pair examine love in all of its chemical, biological, political, and technological dimensions, ultimately asking readers to examine our own infidelities to our ideals.
"What makes GUINEVERE IN BALTIMORE work…is the sheer brilliance of the individual poems. The finest poetry, the kind one wants to keep re-reading, mostly comes down to memorable turns of phrase and vivid detail, and that is what one finds here. Of course, for a language to come alive for the reader, one has to hear the voice of whoever is speaking in the poem, which requires verbal imagination and an exquisite ear for how different types of people talk. GUINEVERE IN BALTIMOREe is masterfully crafted, a veritable feast for any lover of words. Being a story about marital infidelity, its poems are full of things both intimate and scandalous. And juicy gossip, as the old Greek and Roman poets knew well, and made sure to record, will outlast empires and even gods." —from the foreword by Charles Simic
"A freakishly brilliant book in its conception, Shelley Puhak's GUINEVERE IN BALTIMORE raises the stakes for American poetry of the twenty-first century. Bow down now, Reader, for this maker means forever, and you're the one in her cross-hairs." —Cate Marvin
"Good poets return to myth and legend in order to reenact their gestures, translating rather than adapting these stories, hoping to siphon something of these ancient tales' former resonance and power off for their own work. Original poets, however, rewrite the stories entirely with a fresher eye and a sharper tongue. They rip our most familiar characters out of their antiquated context and, by doing so, remind us anew that our heroes and heroines of yore have never been safe, nor their archetypal renderings anodyne. This is what Shelley Puhak has done with the Arthurian legends in her newest collection. In hilariously acid and completely contemporary language, Puhak gives us a Lancelot who bickers at Starbucks, an Arthur suffering from an enlarged prostate, and a Guinevere who finally, fully realizes the consequence of the betrayals she has initiated, along with a few others which we all must face—disloyalty, disappointment, the aging of a once-beautiful body and, worse, the realization that even the strongest passions fade." —Paisley Rekdal
"This is a dazzling work—bold, brilliant, and startlingly familiar with Arthurian literature. Puhak knows her Tennyson and her William Morris, but she veers away from these sources as readily as she pays tribute to them." —Meridian
"Who wouldn't love that title?…Having Arthur, Lancelot, Guinevere and others in Baltimore is inspired, unprecedented and indicative of this poet's saucy imagination. The template is perfect playgrounds for Puhak's talent and abilities, as poem after poem tell spirited and stirring emotional adventures plus Camelot's sex in the city. Ignoring this book is not an option." —Washington Independent Review of Books
"GUINEVERE IN BALTIMORE comprises a sequence of dramatic monologues in which the Arthurian lovers navigate their doomed affair in our own age of austerity. Charles Simic…calls the book 'masterfully crafted, a veritable feast for any lover of words.' Baltimore's CityPaper…declares that this is 'book easy to fall in love with.'"—Baltimore Review
"Recasting Arthurian legend so that Camelot is a corporation located in contemporary Baltimore could be a dreadful conceit, a two-minute bit of failed sketch comedy. Put it in verse and the danger is even greater. But Shelley Puhak (who placed in the City Paper Poetry and Fiction Contest twice) avoids the potential pitfalls with her smart, sexy, and slyly devastating Anthony Hecht Prize-winning book, GUINEVERE IN BALTIMORE…it is in the perfectly allotted proportions of the sexy, the wry, the sharp, and sly, the economic, the local, the corporate, and the mythic that this book shines. Though the poems are ostensibly lyric, their mythical subject and lack of self-absorption propel them toward the realm of the epic—a modest, modern form of epic, closest, perhaps, to John Berryman's dream songs about Henry and Mr. Bones." —Baltimore City Paper
Author Bio
Shelley Puhak was born in Washington, D.C. and grew up in Maryland. She holds an MFA from the University of New Orleans and an MA from the University of Delaware. Her first collection, STALIN IN ARUBA (Black Lawrence/Dzanc), was awarded the Towson Prize for Literature. Her latest collection is GUINEVERE IN BALTIMORE (2013). Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Carolina Quarterly, FIELD, and Ninth Letter. She teaches at Notre Dame of Maryland University, where she is Eichner Professor of Creative Writing.
Author City: CATONSVILLE, MD USA