The Mouths of Grazing Things
By Jennifer Boyden
(University of Wisconsin Press, Paperback, 9780299235147, 80pp.)
Publication Date: April 1, 2010
Other Editions of This Title: Google eBook
Categories: American - General
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The Mouths of Grazing Things is an unflinching, lyrical meditation on nature’s forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing, estrangement, magnetism, and self-otherness that ensue. Arrestingly tender and fiercely protective of where nature lurks in and out of us still, Boyden translates for a new landscape where a brain in a jar is anchored by an apple, a fly-tying fisherman finds love songs to fish scattered among the barber’s sweepings, and the players at “the most dangerous playground in the world” prepare for anything with one fist clenched and the other full of sugar. In poems built to survive an unsafe journey, this book delivers the now-beyond, the almost-was, the near-forgotten, and the just-in-time.
Jennifer Boyden, a Minnesota native, lives in Washington State and teaches literature and writing. Her poetry has appeared in journals such as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, and The Mid-American Review. Boyden’s awards include the PEN Northwest writing residency and a Washington State Artist Trust Grant. This is her first full-length collection.
“In a clear, muscular language loaded with precise revealing metaphor, Jennifer Boyden delivers a world. These are poems of a mature poet deeply engaged with her environment, demonstrating again and again the power of language to surprise and delight in moments of true insight.”—Sam Hamill
“Delightful, that such complexity of mind should be given to us in such lucid packages.”—Albert Goldbarth
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