Near Solstice: Prose Poems

by Madelon Sprengnether

Overview

"Madelon Sprengnether's short prose poems surprise us with their quick turns and telegraphic insights, their physical bearing—what she calls "bodyworlds"—and spiritual poise. Near Solstice is a book of urgencies."—Edward Hirsch

This new collection is grounded in the body and sensual awareness as the means by which we experience the world. In a series of interlinked prose poems, Sprengnether meditates on the death of parents, family members, and friends, with the passing of seasons, sexuality, the consolations of landscape, and (always) the significance of light.

Madelon Sprengnether is Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota where she teaches in the MFA program.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780985981891
Publisher:	Holy Cow! Press
Publication date:	05/19/2015
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Madelon Sprengnether is Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the MFA Program. She is the author of two memoirs, Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreams, and Crying at the Movies; two collections of poetry, The Normal Heart, and The Angel of Duluth; a co-edited collection of women’s travel writing, The House on Via Gombito; and numerous other works of feminist literary and psychoanalytic scholarship. The Normal Heart was a Minnesota Voices winner, and Crying at the Movies was a Minnesota Book Award finalist. In addition, she has received awards from the Bush Foundation, The Loft, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her memoir Great River Road: Memoir and Memory is forthcoming from New Rivers Press. For more information see her website: www.madelonsprengnether.com.

Table of Contents

Near Solstice 1

Near solstice 3

Landscape 4

Ash Wednesday 5

Hospital 6

Sauna 7

Heat 8

Skin 9

Fluids 10

Hands 11

Sinews 12

Heart 13

Sarasota 15

Sarasota 17

Surf 18

Half Moon Bay 19

Jungle Gardens 20

Spanish Point 21

Drowning in air 22

In May 23

Like a painting by Edward clapper 24

Green 25

Leda at the Lake 27

Serving 29

Attending (for my former mother-in-law) 30

Lola 31

Logo Mar 33

Racoon 35

Leda at the lake 37

Golden door 38

August 39

St. Francis 41

St. Francis 43

Pentecost 44

Reliquary 45

God considers his sons Qusay and Uday 46

God considers the resurrection according to Stanley Spencer 47

Stanley Spencer talks back 48

Bodyworlds 49

Bodyworlds 51

Massage 56

Eurydice 59

How amazed 61

Near death 62

After 63

Blue-violet light 65

October fire 66

Early December 67

This soft fate 68

Birds 69

Eurydice 70

El Dorado 73

El Dorado 75

Fight uprises 80

Good Friday, Driving Eastward (after John Donne) 81

About the Author 83

Editorial Reviews

“Madelon Sprengnether’s short prose poems surprise us with their quick turns and telegraphic insights, their physical bearing—what she calls “bodyworlds”—and spiritual poise. Near Solstice is a book of urgencies.”--Edward Hirsch

“'If I only knew where we were going. I’d know how to end.' writes Madelon Sprengnether in her brilliant new book of prose poems, Near Solstice. Perhaps that is true, but it makes us the luckiest of readers that she doesn’t know; that we are allowed to come along for this journey that is at moments harrowing, at moments joyful. A journey that is always approached in the spirit of an imaginative investigation that leaves the reader continually wanting more. What a deep pleasure this book is!”--Jim Moore, author of Underground: New and Selected Poems

“'I can’t stop seeing,' one narrator proclaims in Madelon Sprengnether’s delicious new collection. And doesn’t that make us all lucky? In Near Solstice, Sprengnether maps the liminal—the ineffable gray spaces between dawn and full sunlight, between dusk and utter darkness, between health and illness, the body “becoming ever more itself over time.” Like Eurydice, Sprengnether travels through dark underworlds in these searching and meditative poems. 'How physical this story,' she writes. We are all 'layers of cells—in an unstable order.' In these poems, Sprengnether invites us into fuller habitation of the body, to notice the gold sky, to hear the urgent call of birds, to feel the proximity of death in order to be more fully alive. Do you feel the 'tongues of ravening dogs at your feet'? This book is a balm, a guide, a hedge, and a companion against the vagaries of mortality.”—Debra Marquart, author of The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere

“A fierce question propels the poems in Madelon Sprengnether’s new book: 'So tell me. What on earth God wants from us?' Is it love, beauty, pleasure, duty? As Sprengnether explores that question, alert to life routines, rituals, sacrifices, even pilgrimages--driving, swimming, caring for an aging parent, exploring landscapes and ancient mythologies--her poems reveal striking layers of desire, grief, and tenderness.”--Patricia Kirkpatrick, author of Odessa

From the Publisher