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The Mouth of Earth: Poems (Test Site Poetry Series)

The Mouth of Earth: Poems (Test Site Poetry Series)

Current price: $17.00
Publication Date: October 6th, 2020
Publisher:
University of Nevada Press
ISBN:
9781948908849
Pages:
80

Description

In this timely and moving collection of poems, Sarah P. Strong explores what it means to live in a world undergoing an irrevocable transformation, the magnitude of which we barely comprehend. A broad range of perspectives shows us different times and places on Earth while unfolding the cyclical nature of human denial and response. A series of linked persona poems about the Dust Bowl recounts the destruction of the Great Plains and how human dreams of plenty destroyed the ancient fertility and stability of the land, how heartbreak and denial contended with bureaucratic insolence. In an imagined view of our planet as it might appear millennia from now, the Earth is "a worry stone / in the pocket of space, or a mood ring / on the finger of a newly minted / god."

The Mouth of Earth serves as both a survival guide for those seeking connection with our planet and one another as well as a compassionate tribute to what we have lost or are losing—the human consequences of such destruction in a time of climate crisis and lost connectivity. Strong’s powerful poems offer us, if not consolation, at least a way toward comprehension in an age of loss, revealing both our ongoing denial of our planet’s fragility and the compelling urgency of our hunger for connection with all life.

About the Author

Sarah P. Strong is the author of Tour of the Breath Gallery: Poems, and two novels, The Fainting Room and Burning the Sea. Their work has appeared widely, including in The Nation, Poetry Daily, Cimarron Review, The SouthwestReview, The Southern Review, Verse Daily, and The Sun. They live near New Haven, Connecticut.

 

Praise for The Mouth of Earth: Poems (Test Site Poetry Series)

“There is a message, febrile but terribly lucid, urgent but entirely mindful in The Mouth of Earth. Ultimately, by means of a nuance indistinguishable from hope, the message becomes music. Here is a book of uncanny calm in an era of panic. Here is substance and renewal.”
—Donald Revell, author of The English Boat

“Sarah P. Strong’s latest collection The Mouth of Earth is as wise as it is candid, offering deftly woven lyrical gifts to the reader even as it reminds us of what we’ve done to the earth. These poems like divining rods find healing waters in the dust bowls of our toughest landscapes, intertwining parenthood, history, the body, and contemporary ecological and political concerns—as Strong writes, “The eye thirsts for rest, the blood for salt, the tongue / for fresh water.” These poems are at once tender and incisive; they cut straight to the heart.” 
—Jennifer Givhan, author of Rosa’s Einstein and Girl with Death Mask 
 
“People often say that a book is ahead of its time, and Strong’s book may be such a book. Strong’s book is visionary, offering a vision of sympathy for the earth and its inhabitants that is sadly lacking in our current political climate.”
—Claudia Keelan, Barrick Distinguished Scholar at University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Sarah P. Strong is a nimble explorer of visible and invisible boundaries, and each of their poems is part of a quest toward wonder and re-envisioning, a quest to go beyond, as the best poems do, the “edge of thinking.”
—Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine, winner of the National Book Award

This dynamic, multi-dimensional and supple collection engages with historic patterns of struggle, privilege, blindness, and above all, empathy. The themes of environmental ruin and the effect and plight of humans on this planet feel urgent rather than gloomy in these poems, a feat Strong pulls off by getting past and present and disparate places and experiences to resonate and chime. There’s something idealistic in this, an alertness and interconnectedness that reads in a sense as hope. The Mouth of Earth is impressive work—coherent and varied, thoughtful and full of lovely things.
—Daisy Fried, author of My Brother is Getting Arrested Again, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

Ecological in its concern and wisely tender in regard to the people and history who brought the planet to such an endangered state . . . Sarah Strong’s book is driven by their love of the earth and wish to understand how and why our civilization has found itself at this critically dangerous juncture.
—Sasha Steensen, author of House of Deer: Poems and professor of English at Colorado State University