Sunbathing on Tyrone Power's Grave

by Kim Dower

Overview

**Gold Medal in Poetry from the Independent Publisher Books Awards**

In Kim Dower’s fourth collection, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, death has never felt so alive! Alluring titles to haunting last lines, the poems in Dower’s fourth collection soothe, terrify, and always surprise, revealing the extraordinary within the ordinary.

Acclaimed for combining the accessible and profound, humor and heartache, Dower’s poetry continues to be quirky, dark, sexy, disarmingly candid, and moving, and here she explores the landscape of death and its intersections with love, longing, obsession, sadness, joy, and beauty. Wise and soaring, these poems bravely imagine another life beyond the one we all know where even the angels surrounding the graves are wearing bikinis, smoking Kool Lights.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781597096218
Publisher:	Red Hen Press
Publication date:	04/01/2019
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Kim Dower grew up in New York City and received a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, where she also taught before moving to Los Angeles. Former City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood, Kim has published four collections of poetry, all with Red Hen Press: Air Kissing on Mars, which was on the Poetry Foundation’s Contemporary Best Sellers list and described by the Los Angeles Times as, “sensual and evocative . . . seamlessly combining humor and heartache,” Slice of Moon, called “unexpected and sublime,” by “O” magazine, Last Train to the Missing Planet, “poems that speak about the grey space between tragedy and tenderness, memory and loss, fragility and perseverance,” said Richard Blanco, and her brand new Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, which Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick, calls exuberant, sexy and sobering.” Nominated for three Pushcart Prizes, Kim’s work has been featured in Garrison Keillor's "The Writer's Almanac," and Ted Kooser’s “American Life in Poetry,” as well as in Ploughshares, Barrow Street, and Rattle. Her poems are included in several anthologies, notably, Wide Awake: Poets of Los Angeles and Beyond, (Beyond Baroque Books/Pacific Coast Poetry Series,) and Coiled Serpent: Poets Arising from the Cultural Quakes & Shifts of Los Angeles, (Tia Chucha Press.) She teaches Poetry and Memory in the B.A. Program of Antioch University. She is also the proud founder of Kim-from-L.A. a well-known literary marketing and publicity company that helps writers get their beautiful words out into the world.

Read an Excerpt

He said I wrote about death,

and I didn’t mean to, this was not

my intent. I meant to say how I loved

the birds, how watching them lift off

the branches, hearing their song

helps me get through the gray morning.

When I wrote about how they crash

into the small dark places that only birds

can fit through, layers of night sky, pipes

through drains, how I’ve seen them splayed

across gutters, piles of feathers stuck

together by dried blood, how once my car

ran over a sparrow, though I swerved,

the road was narrow, the bird not quick

enough, dragged it under my tire as I drove

to forget, bird disappearing part by part,

beak, slender feet, fretful, hot,

I did not mean to write about death,

but rather how when something dies

we remember who we love, and we

die a little too, we who are still breathing,

we who still have the energy to survive.

Interviews

The San Diego Tribune interview with Erica Jong

Editorial Reviews

“Unexpected and sublime.”
—O Magazine on Slice of Moon

From the Publisher

https://jewishjournal.com/culture/books/297971/two-poets-elevate-matters-of-life-and-death/

Jonathan Kirsch / Jewish Journal Review

Jewish Journal - Jonathan Kirsch