Incarnadine

Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

* An NPR, Slate, Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Willamette Week, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013 *

In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning--for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America's most ambitious poets.

Author: Mary Szybist
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 02/05/2013
Pages: 72
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.37lbs
Size: 8.98h x 7.51w x 0.20d
ISBN: 9781555976354


Award: National Book Awards - Winner
Award: Oregon Book Awards - Winner


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 01/01/2013 pg. 95
Library Journal 02/01/2013 pg. 70
Publishers Weekly 01/21/2013 pg. 44
Publishers Weekly Best Books 11/04/2013 pg. 25
Christian Century 12/11/2013 pg. 24

About the Author
Mary Szybist is the author of a previous poetry collection, Granted, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She teaches at Lewis & Clark College and lives in Portland, Oregon.