A wake with nine shades : poems / Jennifer Sperry Steinorth.

Self-portrait with perennial shade -- Wake : a sleep in forty-something winks -- Shoveling -- Infernal coo I -- Commute -- Paradigm -- While we are reefing down the main with waves at twelve feet and the kids are losing their lunch and the dinghy breaks free -- Plow man -- Dear robber -- Lines writ on the backside of a dozer invoice -- Absolute power -- Infernal coo II -- Pissed -- Wake, a week without weather -- Below the dam -- Eye -- In the shower -- Eve -- Infernal coo III -- X Country meet -- Gasoline finger reek -- Infernal coo IV -- About face -- The wake again -- Infernal coo V -- God dog -- If an apple were a ravine -- A triste little tryst w/r frost, select billets doux -- Not a confession -- Infernal coo VI -- Night apartment -- Blizzard -- Aromatherapy -- Infernal coo VII -- Rotary -- Dear collar -- Ordinary sheers -- Infernal coo VIII -- Wake in the woods -- This side of the fair grounds -- What if we wake up dead -- Wake and island -- Range -- Lily wakes -- Blue bird -- Lullaby for tenor -- Infernal coo IX.

A Wake with Nine Shades is an exploration of grief and culpability, a Dantean descent through contemporary midlife crisis. Populated by ghosts and children, lovers and amputations, bodies of water, insomnia, debt and domestic violence, Steinorth measures what is broken against the white space of the page, paying homage to the Great Lakes and snowscapes her poems inhabit and the vacancies, denials and drains they circle. Formally inventive and musically obsessive, the book's unconventional formal construction and lyric wit contribute what Eleanor Wilner deems the essential "Lightness" described by Italo Calvino, noting Steinorth's "ability to treat weighty subjects with a mastery of style ... a liveliness of imagination and intelligence that lightens, without denial, what would otherwise be unbearable. ."

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on December 17, 2020).

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