{"product_id":"the-curiosities-9781602352391","title":"The Curiosities","description":"Brittany Perham's first collection, THE CURIOSITIES, fixes its sure and unsettling gaze on daughters and fathers, sisters and brothers, madness, sickness, longing and love. These poems make up a cabinet of curiosities because they hold what is fascinating or frightening, beautiful or awesome- a \"stomach plumed by syringe,\" a \"zoo's lost leopard,\" a \"forest of high-waisted trees\"- up to the eye. In their image-making, the poems place language itself beneath the glass slide of a microscope in order to discern its component structures, its natural patterns. Curiosity here is a way of looking-unsatisfiable, looping back on itself, yielding only further questions. In these uncanny and passionate poems our own lives are made strange to us, and we are wonderstruck. WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING: \"The poems in The Curiosities make a powerful system, almost an atmosphere out of stories of the body and memories of place. In poem after poem, the speaker is mysterious but never remote; the language is deliberate but never staged. And at all times, the music, intensity and craft of the work bring us close. This is a wonderful debut collection.\"-EAVAN BOLAND \"With curatorial precision and a starling's penchant for multiple threads in both song and shelter, Brittany Perham has fashioned a haven of curiosities captivating to the ear as well as the eye. These poems dream in color and sound: bright, chantant, lifting and lowering the music and the light, so that we are transported from this world into the antechambers of the heart and back again. You cannot re-enter the waking world after reading these lucid, eloquent poems and not feel forever changed.\"-D. A. POWELL \"As with all wunderkammern, cabinets of curiosities, it is the quality of the collected wonders that matters. A brother's illness, a family's disintegration and abiding bonds, the odd dignity of children, a teacher's suicide, loss and redemption of a vital love-these old stories, in Brittany Perham's hands, become new. Poems whose titles derive from other poets and poems-Wyatt, Frost, Dickinson, nursery rhyme-serve as touchstones, letting us know that although a \"hard season\" of strange forsaking has passed, in its wake is a coming to terms with pain's exactitude and the happinesses that, as Dickinson said, \"would be life.\" In \"Afterlove,\" the poet describes her wary hope as \"stiff carriers crowd ing] \/ my rooms, an army of competing clatter \/ and rust,\" yet she dares to further hope: \"I saw there was something still \/ for each of us to want. \/\/ Gulls dispersed, white \/ above the roofline, so white \/ I could not tell \/ one from the other, nor one \/ from the sky.\" Such ecstasy and oneiric yearning are just two marvels of this irresistible collection.\"-LISA RUSS SPAAR BRITTANY PERHAM is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow from 2009-2011. Her work may be found in the Bellevue Literary Review, Drunken Boat, Lo-Ball, Southern Poetry Review, TriQuarterly, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePerham, Brittany:\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e - Brittany Perham is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University, where she was a Wallace Stegner Fellow from 2009 to 2011. Her work may be found in the \u003cem\u003eBellevue Literary Review\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eDrunken Boat\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eLo-Ball\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eSouthern Poetry Review\u003c\/em\u003e, \u003cem\u003eTriQuarterly\u003c\/em\u003e, and elsewhere. She lives in San Francisco.","brand":"Parlor Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50359199760658,"sku":"9781602352391","price":14.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_9808ffb2-d087-45b0-a157-17d26a7d591b.jpg?v=1728352434","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/the-curiosities-9781602352391","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}