Rue

by Kathryn Nuernberger

Overview

One of Big Other's "Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020"

In this fiercely feminist ecopoetic collection, Kathryn Nuernberger reclaims love and resilience in an age of cruelty.

As the speaker—an artist and intellectual—finds herself living through a rocky marriage in a conservative rural state, she maintains her sense of identity by studying the science and folklore of plants historically used for birth control. Her botanical portraits of common herbs like Queen Anne’s lace and pennyroyal are interwoven with lyric biographies of groundbreaking women ecologists whose stories have been left untold in textbooks.

With equal parts righteous fury and tender wisdom, Rue reassesses the past and recontextualizes the present to tell a story about breaking down, breaking through, and breaking into an honest, authentic expression of self.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781942683971
Publisher:	BOA Editions, Ltd.
Publication date:	04/07/2020
Series:	American Poets Continuum , #176
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two previous poetry collections, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. She has also written a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. Fascinated by the history of science and the natural world, she has received research fellowships from the H. J. Andrews Research Forest, American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life. Other awards include an NEA fellowship and the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems and essays have appeared widely in journals, including 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Field, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry International, West Branch, Willow Springs, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Ohio Universityand an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. After spending many years directing Pleiades Press, she now teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota and lives with her family in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN.

Read an Excerpt

The New Elements

Elements can be named after a scientist,
a mineral, a place or a country, a property,
or a mythological concept. The four new elements, all of which are synthetic,
were discovered by slamming lighter nuclei into each other and tracking the resulting decay of the radioactive superheavies.
I don’t know about you, but I’m tired of making things out of other things.
I came out to this bar to read the news in the company of people falling in love for only the second or third time. Like other superheavies that populate the end of the periodic table, the new ones exist for only fractions of a second before dissolving into more familiar atomic particles.
Is it true that I’m here hoping a stranger might take me home? Of course it is.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“Rue is a brilliant meditation on corporeality, history, and what it means to move through the natural and material world—be it a field of pennyroyal or the Dollar General—in a female body. Kathryn Nuernberger’s astonishing poems present an urgent and devastating discourse, via many-layered gut-punch narratives, of the complex ways in which we are connected to one another that together become a powerful reckoning on female strength and desire in the #MeToo era.”

—Erika Meitner, author of Holy Moly, Carry Me

“This collection lets you open yourself to the possibility of truth stripped bare of the cultural baggage that keeps us from speaking our minds to strangers and friends and lovers alike. Let Rue bewitch you, let it charm you, as rue strung around the neck to keep your vision sharp and deflect from plague and remedy what ails you. Let it locate what ails you, and extract it with whatever needs to be said.”

—Jennifer Givhan, author of Rosa’s Einstein

“These long, chattering poems offer so much warmth and intimacy of voice that we hardly notice Kathyrn Nuernberger has talked us straight into confrontations with some of the most sinister aspects of Western modernity. The animal violence underlying bourgeois decorum, the suffocating brutality of our patriarchy, and the gross and beastly truths of our human sexuality are all lined up here. Nuernberger knocks them down one by one with cutting humor, a breadth of erudition and book smarts, and the reassuring potency of her feminism.”

—Jaswinder Bolina, author of The 44th of July

“Kathryn Nuernberger’s remarkable collection Rue asks what it means to know another person, how imagination and action intersect to shape our experiences of love and desire. I adore how her poems show a mind in motion, its obsessions, its honesties. I adore its deft syntax winding us from a love of nature to the nature of love, interrogating what it means to love complicated people in history and in the present—what it is to be a complicated person. Among the book’s questions concern the female body—who gets to control it and how, who imperils it and under what guise of professionalism or friendship, and what flowers let women control it for themselves.”

—Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade

Editorial Reviews

★ 03/16/2020

Disillusionment, bigotry, and violence pervade the riveting third book from Nuernberger (The End of Pink) as sardonic social analysis and explorations of nature overlay a confessional narrative. Nuernberger illustrates the “varieties of performance,” the variations of happiness and the possibility for euphoria through unrelenting will: “If I try I can still/ at least talk myself into feeling like a celestial event.” She wisely and whimsically deconstructs her own preconceptions: “Sometimes I feel like every character/ I meet is an allegory of myself.” In her best moments, her voice holds an oracular, deceptively dry simplicity reminiscent of Rumi: “There is an old man who will not stop asking/ why. Our ears will not stop ringing with it./ There is an answer that is a silence that grows/ longer and deeper as you peer into it.” Nuernberger continually captivates the reader’s curiosity in these stylish lines. Confidently vulnerable and irreverently prophetic, Nuernberger provides the catharsis and insight that will turn new readers into loyal fans. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Rue is a brilliant meditation on corporeality, history, and what it means to move through the natural and material world—be it a field of pennyroyal or the Dollar General—in a female body. Kathryn Nuernberger’s astonishing poems present an urgent and devastating discourse, via many-layered gut-punch narratives, of the complex ways in which we are connected to one another that together become a powerful reckoning on female strength and desire in the #MeToo era.”
—Erika Meitner, author of Holy Moly, Carry Me

“This collection lets you open yourself to the possibility of truth stripped bare of the cultural baggage that keeps us from speaking our minds to strangers and friends and lovers alike. Let Rue bewitch you, let it charm you, as rue strung around the neck to keep your vision sharp and deflect from plague and remedy what ails you. Let it locate what ails you, and extract it with whatever needs to be said.”
—Jennifer Givhan, author of Rosa’s Einstein

“These long, chattering poems offer so much warmth and intimacy of voice that we hardly notice Kathyrn Nuernberger has talked us straight into confrontations with some of the most sinister aspects of Western modernity. The animal violence underlying bourgeois decorum, the suffocating brutality of our patriarchy, and the gross and beastly truths of our human sexuality are all lined up here. Nuernberger knocks them down one by one with cutting humor, a breadth of erudition and book smarts, and the reassuring potency of her feminism.”
—Jaswinder Bolina, author of The 44th of July

“Kathryn Nuernberger’s remarkable collection Rue asks what it means to know another person, how imagination and action intersect to shape our experiences of love and desire. I adore how her poems show a mind in motion, its obsessions, its honesties. I adore its deft syntax winding us from a love of nature to the nature of love, interrogating what it means to love complicated people in history and in the present—what it is to be a complicated person. Among the book’s questions concern the female body—who gets to control it and how, who imperils it and under what guise of professionalism or friendship, and what flowers let women control it for themselves.”
—Traci Brimhall, author of Saudade

From the Publisher