A Cartography of Home

by Hayden Saunier, Diane Lockward (Editor)

Overview

"Mad fury all around"-somehow the right words about life make it easier to get on with it. These poems do exactly that, catching us out in the most adroit, surprising ways: by sheer skill, self-aware intellect, a mordant wit, abundant heart, a gift for metaphor so exact it produces combustible insights of complex truth. These poems brilliantly enact our contradictory nature, its poles, and they compel us to look within.

-Eleanor Wilner

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781947896352
Publisher:	Terrapin Books
Publication date:	02/15/2021
Series:	Redux
Pages:	98
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.23(d)

About the Author

Hayden Saunier is the author of the poetry collections How to Wear This Body, Say Luck, Tips for Domestic Travel, and a chapbook, Field Trip to the Underworld. Her work has been awarded the Pablo Neruda Prize, the Rattle Poetry Prize, and the Gell Poetry Award, and has been published in numerous journals, including Beloit Poetry Journal, Smartish Pace, Tar River Poetry, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Vox Populi. Her work has also been featured on Poetry Daily and The Writer's Almanac. A professional actor, she is the founder/director of the poetry and improvisation performance group, No River Twice, which creates interactive, audience directed poetry readings. She lives on a farm in Pennsylvania.

Editorial Reviews

Like Elizabeth Bishop, Hayden Saunier is a poet of place. She is a poet of domesticity. For her, home is anywhere she is: a highway motel, a minimart, a discount super store, a stone house. Like Bishop, she is precise with details, but she transfigures her details into something larger, something radiant. Her pantry, she says, is full, and she delights in every item, remembering at the outset to invite the reader in: "Sit down and eat." She welcomes us into her world, both external and interior, tame and wild. "It's magic," she says, but warns, "It's possible this house won't hold." But it does, and so do these evocative poems. By the time we take our leave, we have been touched by their magic.

-George Drew

Hayden Saunier's poems are sure bets for an encounter with the poetic. That is, a way of entering a world through a poet's eye: a real world, keenly observed, charted, in both close detail and wide angles, and delivered to us in one suspenseful line after the other. These poems connect us to both the micro and macro levels of living and bring us back home to our place in our minds, bodies, and the natural world.

-Niloufar Talebi

From the Publisher