Errata

by Lisa Fay Coutley

Overview

COR series Open Competition winner
Finalist, INDIEFAB Book of the Year

Lisa Fay Coutley’s lyrical debut collection, Errata, investigates the delicate balance between parent and child, love and loss, hope and grief. Errata’s narrator reflects on struggles and fears that span generations in compositions that are at once musical and bleak. Coutley’s narrative journey is often a dark one, exploring not only the loss of loved ones but also the potential to lose one’s very self. The collection unravels the lingering consequences of abuse and addiction, yet threads of hope and determination weave a finely wrought path through the dark side of human relationships, illuminating the power of the will to survive. Coutley’s sharp yet tender collection will both haunt readers and move them to reflect, to remember, and most of all, to persevere.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809334483
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	09/24/2015
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Lisa Fay Coutley is an assistant professor of creative writing, with an emphasis on poetry, at Snow College in Utah. She was awarded a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts (2013), received scholarships to the Sewanee and Bread Loaf Writers’ Conferences, and won an Academy of American Poets Levis Prize. Her poetry has appeared in many journals and books, including Crazyhorse, Gulf Coast, Best of the Net 2013, and Best New Poets 2010. Errata is her first book. 

Table of Contents

Contents

Acknowledgments

ONE
Shooting Geese,
Elegy for a Skinwalker
Ode to the Bottle
Driving Drunk, & a Dozen White Crosses
Researchers Find Mice Pass On Trauma to Subsequent Generations
Dear Morpheus—
Posing for Aunt Sandy
Emptying the Red Vase
Why to Bury a Parrot
The Way the Plot
Respiration

TWO
On Home
Coffee
Dirty Fruit
Listen
During the Final Scene
Her Father Says She Worries Too Much
Chicken Soup
After the Fire
Sadly, There Was No Dog Bite
Goodbye in the Voice of My Father
Self-Portrait as Pyrocumulonimbus
Woman from Water

THREE
My Lake
In Which Dorothy Appears
Driving Up-Canyon with My Two Teen Sons
Commute
In the Carnival of Breathing
Twelve Days Scrubbing the Dead
Careo
Self-Portrait as Mountains Surrounding a Dry Lakebed
Ash over Utah
The Lapidary Speaks
Patientia

FOUR
Errata
Family Portrait as the Language of Disaster
Love & Squall
When He Comes at Me
Ode to Postpartum
Small Break in the Cirrocumulus
To Sleep
View from the High Road
My Desert
Barefoot on the Pulpit
For My First Dog

Notes

Editorial Reviews

Taking Sylvia Plath as its acknowledged lodestar, Coutley’s bold first collection offers an unsentimental extension of midcentury confessional poetry. In spare, angular language that snarls with music, she gives fierce voice to the daughter, the lover, the mother to expose the secret chafes and reframings of a woman’s experience, bearing witness to the errata of lived experience against expectation—‘not,’ as she writes, ‘for the transformation but the record.’ Coutley dares her readers to a staring contest and never looks away.”—Kimberly Johnson, author of Uncommon Prayer

“The beauty in Errata is a perilous one—the landscape of the book its own destiny—corrective, exacting. Her lexicon holds with lovely tension ‘the word fragile, the word impassable’—and still we learn from Coutley to navigate ‘by the compass of a rattlesnake’s tongue’ and to trust ‘ravens tugging at the firmament.’ Her subjects ranging from family and motherhood to mortality and the inescapable dangers of the ordinary, Coutley’s poems sustain ‘the urgency of homing bones.’ Errata is an unforgettable volume.”—Claudia Emerson, author of The Opposite House

“Lover, mother, daughter, poet: each of Lisa Fay Coutley’s identities plays a necessary role in this balanced and brave first collection that speaks with the wisdom of a second or third. Her ability to split the difference between lyric and narrative registers allows Errata to become song and story simultaneously—the act of leaving and, later, the looking back at what’s been left.”—Dorianne Laux, author of The Book of Men

“Coutley gathers up the strongest of her images and strings them together with a needle of intense yearning and the thread of a very strong line. The ache of yearning here exists between man and woman, mother and son, daughter and father or mother, who powerfully attract and also repel like magnets. The startling objects of her imagery, such as a kitchen knife or a cigarette, contain both domestic bliss and certain danger, tenderness and precision. Coutley’s poetry places these objects not only in the field of our vision but also in our hands.”—John Poch, author of Fix Quiet

“Coutley’s collection soars when the poems in which the speaker tries to teach her sons about life are buttressed against the poems in which the speaker herself is learning about life. This is the heart of Errata.” —The Rumpus

“Errata is the latest addition to the outstanding Crab Orchard Series in Poetry from the Southern Illinois University Press and is very highly recommended.” -The Midwest Book Review 

From the Publisher