Anna, Washing: Poems

by Ted Genoways

Overview

Set against the bleak backdrop of the Yukon and the historical moment of the 1897 Klondike gold rush, this chronologically arranged series of sonnets is grounded in the lived experience of Finnish immigrants Anna and Abe Malm. Anna hauls her Anthony Wayne Washer into the wilderness and sets up a laundry business while Abe seeks his fortune. Anna and Abe share a unique history, revealed in the book's epigraph: Anna, nineteen years her husband's senior, had first raised him and then married him.

Genoways's graceful formalism makes percussive music of a story marked by isolation and brutal difficulty. He manages a deft and plain-speaking rhyme that is in keeping with the tough lives his poems explore. The poems, which shift in frame from Anna's letters or Abe's diary to third-person verse that captures the characters' inner thoughts, bring the vitality of luminous detail and psychological depth to the arc of history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820332062
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	09/15/2008
Series:	The VQR Poetry Series
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

TED GENOWAYS is the author of five books, including This Blessed Earth and The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. His honors include a James Beard Foundation Award, a National Press Club Award, an Association of Food Journalists Award, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He is a contributing editor at Mother Jones, the New Republic, and Pacific Standard. For nine years, he was editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives outside Lincoln, Nebraska, with the photographer Mary Anne Andrei and their teenage son.

TED GENOWAYS is the author of five books, including This Blessed Earth and The Chain: Farm, Factory, and the Fate of Our Food. His honors include a James Beard Foundation Award, a National Press Club Award, an Association of Food Journalists Award, and the James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism. He is a contributing editor at Mother Jones, the New Republic, and Pacific Standard. For nine years, he was editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He lives outside Lincoln, Nebraska, with the photographer Mary Anne Andrei and their teenage son.

Editorial Reviews

In Mr. Genoways's hands the sonnet is pleasingly elastic. . . . Formally astute and emotionally resonant, Anna, Washing is a fine example of the historical narrative in lyric form.

author of First Hand - Linda Bierds

While in conversation with excellent books that have come before it—Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, Ellen Voigt's Kyrie, and A. Van Jordan's Macnolia, for example—its framework, balance of thematic material, its scaffolding of form and elegantly shifting perspectives make it wholly original. Quite simply, a beautiful book.

author of Native Guard - Natasha Trethewey

Genoways has evoked history very well in this work. . . . The language here is spare, but it needn't be anything else. Throughout this book, Genoways is consistently able to convey large ideas and a range of feelings with an absolute minimum of words. It's a talent very few writers possess. . . . Honing this story down to its essentials without losing its essence could not have been easy, even if the author makes it look so.

Fairbanks Daily News-Miner - David A. James

"In Mr. Genoways's hands the sonnet is pleasingly elastic. . . . Formally astute and emotionally resonant, Anna, Washing is a fine example of the historical narrative in lyric form."--Linda Bierds, author of First Hand

"While in conversation with excellent books that have come before it—Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah, Ellen Voigt's Kyrie, and A. Van Jordan's Macnolia, for example—its framework, balance of thematic material, its scaffolding of form and elegantly shifting perspectives make it wholly original. Quite simply, a beautiful book.”--Natasha Trethewey, author of Native Guard

"Genoways has evoked history very well in this work. . . . The language here is spare, but it needn't be anything else. Throughout this book, Genoways is consistently able to convey large ideas and a range of feelings with an absolute minimum of words. It's a talent very few writers possess. . . . Honing this story down to its essentials without losing its essence could not have been easy, even if the author makes it look so."--David A. James, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner

From the Publisher