Bite Every Sorrow: Poems
"This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning." — C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, "What's life without the details?"
Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in "You Can't Have It All:"

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookof the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would biteevery sorrow until it fled

Whether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone — how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.

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Bite Every Sorrow: Poems
"This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning." — C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, "What's life without the details?"
Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in "You Can't Have It All:"

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookof the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would biteevery sorrow until it fled

Whether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone — how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.

18.95 In Stock
Bite Every Sorrow: Poems

Bite Every Sorrow: Poems

by Barbara Ras
Bite Every Sorrow: Poems

Bite Every Sorrow: Poems

by Barbara Ras

Paperback

$18.95 
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Overview

"This is a splendid book, morally serious, poetically authentic, spiritually discerning." — C. K. Williams, from his judge's citation for the 1997 Walt Whitman Award Barbara Ras, a poet exquisitely heedful of nuance both physical and visceral, cinches deserved renown with this prize-winning debut collection. Bite Every Sorrow invites the reader to embrace beauty, loss, outrage, and the world in all its particular heartbreaks and hilarities, because, as Ras asks, "What's life without the details?"
Her ability to tap the ordinary and draw forth profundity is brilliantly displayed in "You Can't Have It All:"

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown handsgloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old fingeron your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful lookof the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would biteevery sorrow until it fled

Whether honoring a dead friend or reveling in the lustful music of insects, Ras's poems poke into unlikely nooks and invented crannies, uncovering questions that matter to everyone — how to laugh, how to hope, how to love.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780807122648
Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
Publication date: 04/01/1998
Series: Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets
Pages: 90
Product dimensions: 5.80(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Barbara Ras 's poems have appeared in Boulevard, American Scholar, the Massachusetts Review, Orion, and many other magazines. She now directs Trinity University Press in San Antonio, Texas.

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