Soluble Fish

by Mary Jo Firth Gillett MFA

Overview

Soluble Fish transports readers to a place of discovery, exploring issues of borders, familial and love relationships, and other aspects of being human. Mary Jo Firth Gillett layers her poems in rich metaphor as she searches for meaning in everyday life. Contemplating a range of topics from teaching poetry to watching her father filet a fish, Gillett’s humorous and playful collection celebrates language and life.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780809327737
Publisher:	Southern Illinois University Press
Publication date:	09/25/2007
Series:	Crab Orchard Series in Poetry
Edition description:	1st Edition
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Award-winning poet Mary Jo Firth Gillett has published her work in numerous literary journals, including Crab Orchard Review, Green Mountains Review, Harvard Review, and Poetry Northwest.

Editorial Reviews

“Soluble Fish is a no-holds-barred romp of language and imagination, a cornucopian celebration of great swathes of the known world, from dung beetles to the ‘black stretch-leotard’ of cosmic space. Mary Jo Firth Gillett’s powerful music does not avoid the chaos and cacophonies of our lives but embraces and transforms them, devours them for nourishment and offers us a splendid richness that challenges, informs, and delights to the point of astonishment.”—Philip Dacey, author of The Mystery of Max Schmitt: Poems on the Life and Work of Thomas Eakins

“Gratitude is what these poems quicken in us, for the witness of this life's abundant gifts: sea monkeys, lily pond, hibiscus—certainly—and the luxuriant ways of fathers, daughters, rivers, song. Gillett transforms the common table, the common talk, into something nearer the holy, holy, holy.”—Thomas Lynch, author of Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans

“Mary Jo Firth Gillett is an audacious writer who swerves between outrageous wit and linguistic abandon. Her insatiable imagination absorbs Pavlov, insect love, potatoes, Newtonian physics and a paper-thin-hibiscus, and this symphony of odd relations existing within and between her poems serves to enlarge our vision, our capacity for sympathy, while producing a rather pleasant form of vertigo. Gillett's juxtapositions delight the senses and intellect simultaneously, making a beeline for the heart of the matter through their vivid attentiveness to the materiality of everyday and not-so-everyday experience.”—Phillis Levin, author of Mercury

From the Publisher