Description
Poetry. Audrey's first collection, Lime, won the 2002 Gerald Cable Book Award. ANY KEEP OR CONTOUR was a runner-up for the thirteenth Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize, run by Waywiser. What Mark Doty, reviewing Lime, said about her work applies just as well to ANY KEEP OR CONTOUR: "Close attention to the world, in these skilled hands, becomes a study of time and mortality, sorrow and limit, joy and the possibility of hope. These poems sound like no one else, alive with a tensile strength and exacting, idiosyncratic perception. They speak to a lived, open-eyed engagement with a long-loved place."
"Audrey Bohanan is a poet of extraordinary depth and talent. Her work is technically sophisticated, linguistically innovative, and emotionally stunning. From the opening lines of this collection's first poem, 'Gorge of Eels,' the reader hears a voice almost startling in its singularity: 'There, in the far upstream, in the wilderness / of the autonomous, a mirroring gulf / of who I most likely was had been lapping / alone along its hollowed shore in the likes / of a fish story.' It is soon apparent that the remarkable twists and turns of her syntax are not mere flourish but a means of reaching to the heart of difficult truths and feelings that more prosaic language can never approach. The narrative element of these poems is sometimes immediately apparent, as in the two 'Winter School' poems, and sometimes more elusive, but none of the stories will leave you untouched. These works have a powerful resonance, which you will not soon forget."—Mark Edelstein
Author Bio
Audrey Bohanan was born in 1948 in central-southern New Hampshire, where she also spent her childhood, growing up on one of the state's few remaining family farms. Educated at the University of New Hampshire and a graduate of the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program, she has taught writing and poetry for The Johns Hopkins University and Champlain College for many years, and also teaches privately and runs workshops in her local area. In addition to her career in poetry, she earlier served an apprenticeship in the printing industry and journeyed in a shop transitioning from hot-metal typography to digital print. She is married to the furniture-maker and musician Jeff Lind. Having moved to coastal Maine in the mid-1970s, they live and work off-the- grid on a piece of backland devoted to tree growth and wildlife habitat.
Author City: USA