{"product_id":"a-magnificent-loneliness-9781961897229","title":"A Magnificent Loneliness","description":"\u003cp\u003e \"I remember \/\/ once, turning to leave, a black purse over her shoulder. . .\" Oneiric and surreal as always, Allison Benis White attempts to mediate, if not make sense of, inconceivable bereavement in her fifth collection of poetry. \"A black purse, \/ over her living shoulder, Love said nothing to me.\" \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e Ethereal, airy, and spare at once, \u003ci\u003eA Magnificent Loneliness\u003c\/i\u003e is a dialogue with ghosts. White, whose previous work won the Rilke Prize and the Four Way Books Levis Prize judged by Claudia Rankine, assembles these pages as an ekphrastic and epistolary record of her solitary journey through loss. These poems relate to artwork, the history of artistic practice, and inherited lore to broker an oblique and piecewise conversation concerning pain too vast to articulate all at once. \"I don't know how to love the world but to love \/ her leaving.\" These lyrical iterations represent White's attempts to comprehend the individual suffering of being alive, and to metabolize the grief of women's epidemic disappearance, literal and spiritual, through sickness and despair. Through those efforts, she illuminates a magnificent loneliness--the privilege of being alive to our anguish, of missing someone dearly because someone dear existed--and a reason for not yet departing that struggle. \"How to leave \/ the world but to turn to leave her-- \/ but to turn my head back \/ to see her.\" \u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAllison Benis White is the author of \u003ci\u003eThe Wendys\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePlease Bury Me in This\u003c\/i\u003e, winner of the Rilke Prize, and \u003ci\u003eSmall Porcelain Head\u003c\/i\u003e, selected by Claudia Rankine for the Levis Prize in Poetry. Her debut, \u003ci\u003eSelf-Portrait with Crayon\u003c\/i\u003e, won the Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Her poems have appeared in \u003ci\u003eThe American Poetry Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Kenyon Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eNew England Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePloughshares\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003ePushcart Prize XLI \u0026amp; XLVII: Best of the Small Presses\u003c\/i\u003e, and elsewhere. She has received honors and awards from the Poetry Society of America, the San Francisco Foundation, and the Academy of American Poets. She teaches at the University of California, Riverside. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Four Way Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51185936367890,"sku":"9781961897229","price":12.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_64ff1846-88d8-4426-86bb-c7fa68b31443.jpg?v=1744595596","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/a-magnificent-loneliness-9781961897229","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}