Hourglass Museum

by Kelli Russell Agodon

Overview

"Lyrical, intelligent, magical, and honest, the poems are both of this world and out of this world. Her uniquely true and mystical voice is like a glass of pure water: refreshing, healing, and oh, so necessary."—Nin Andrews

"Her poems are an intense vision of the power of art to heal, to help us understand ourselves and our world. Agodon invokes artists as disparate as Kahlo and Cornell, Picasso and Pollock, as a way into the world she creates for us in her deft and musical poems. She brilliantly succeeds."—Wyn Cooper

Kelli Russell Agodon is the author of two previous collections of poetry and lives in Kingston, Washington.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781935210511
Publisher:	White Pine Press
Publication date:	02/11/2014
Pages:	108
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Kelli Russell Agodon: Kelli Russell Agodon was born and raised in Seattle and educated at the University of Washington and Pacific Lutheran University's Rainier Writers Workshop where she received her MFA in creative writing. She is the author of Small Knots (2004) and Geography, winner of the 2003 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award.
Her work has been appeared in literary magazines and anthologies such as the Atlantic Monthly, Prairie Schooner, Notre Dame Review, North American Review, Image, 5 a.m, Meridian, Crab Orchard Review, Calyx, The Seattle Review, Poets Against the War edited by Sam Hamill, as well as on NPR’s “The Writer’s Almanac” with Garrison Keillor and in Keillor's second anthology, Good Poems for Hard Times (Viking Press).

Kelli is a recipient of three Washington State Artist Trust GAP grants, the James Hearst Poetry Prize, the Dorothy Rosenberg Poetry Prize, the William Stafford Award, the Carlin Aden Award for formal verse, a Soapstone Writer's Residency, and a grant from the Puffin Foundation for her work towards peace and as a poetry editor for the broadside series: The Making of Peace.

Currently, Kelli lives in a seaside community in the Northwest with her family. She is the co-editor of Seattle’s literary journal, Crab Creek Review. Visit her website at: www.agodon.com

Table of Contents

Dear Serious Museum Patrons 13

Portraits

The Broken Column 17

If My Life Were a Canvas, It Would Be a Jackson Pollock Paint-By-Number 19

A Moment Ago, Everything Was Beautiful 21

Slow Swirl at the Edge of the Sea 23

Portrait of a Couple on a Cliff After Twenty Years Together 24

Fortune Telling Parrot 26

Souvenir Boxes 27

Self Portrait with Escape Ladder 29

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Traveler 30

Line Forms Here 31

After You Tell Me You Want to Build a Diorama of Your Grandmother's Suicide 34

Frida Kahlo Tattoo 36

How To Make a Picasso Cocktail 38

Drowning Girl: A Waterlogged Ars Poetica 40

Self Portrait with Reader 42

Sketchbook of Nudes

in the middle of predicting my life 47

most of us connect through pain 48

I wonder if I might be lonelier 49

in the corner of the painting called success 50

sometimes when I sleep 51

most winters I make a container for my soul 52

I don't want to be absorbed 53

you may remember how I'm always discussing 54

in the room of language 55

in the shower the water 56

I'm attracted to the residue of imagination 57

make beautiful things 58

Ink and Watercolor

Sketchbook with an Undercurrent of Grief 61

La Magie Noire 62

Periodo Azul 65

Taboo Against Mourning 67

Untided (Composition in Blue) 69

Directions for Collecting and Preserving Humans 72

After Leaving the Floating City 73

Daringly Balanced: The Life of an Artist 74

How to Be a Genius in Many Different Fields 75

Distant Horizons: An Abstract 76

Sketch of a Fig Tree 78

Meaningless Consequence 79

Current Exhibition: Her Invented Museum

Luxury, Calm, and Desire 83

Dune Primrose 84

Death of a Housewife, Oil on Linen 86

Mural of a Writing Residency 87

Portrait of an Argument 90

Woman Under Glass 91

Writing Studio D: A Retrospective in Spring 93

The Art of Forgiveness 97

Menancing Gods: An Abstract 98

Red Poppy 99

In Praise of Staying Married 101

Shadowboxing Andy Warhol 103

Collaboration: On Some Other Planet We're Newlyweds 105

Surrealist Angel 107

Sky Cathedral Ghazal 108

Darling: An Abstract 109

After Hours Dining at the Hourglass Café 111

Notes 112

The Author 118