Today's poem is "Time is a Horse"
from Crave
Christine Gelineau
is also the author of the book-length poetic sequence Appetite for the Divine (Editor's Choice for the Robert McGovern Publication Prize) and Remorseless Loyalty (winner of the Richard Snyder Publication Prize), both from Ashland Poetry Press, and co-editor with Jack B. Bedell of the anthology French Connections: A Gathering of Franco-American Poets. A recipient of the Pushcart Prize, Gelineau teaches at Binghamton University and in the low-residency MFA at Wilkes University. Gelineau lives with her husband on a farm in upstate New York.
Books by Christine Gelineau:
Other poems on the web by Christine Gelineau:
"Breaking Babies"
Christine Gelineau's Website.
About Crave:
"Unflinching before loss and trauma, and compassionate toward humans and other animals, Crave is a profoundly physical book of poetry. Christine Gelineau's brave and steadfast speakers hunger for meaning, confront the mysteries of passing time, honor the vulnerabilities of the innocent, and discover beauty without sacrificing truth. Voices in this luminous collection might echo the words the author gives Vermeer: 'I crave radiance like air.'"
"In Christine Gelineau's unflinching volume Crave, poem after poem bears witness to the evidence of bodies in crisis, power gone awry, the long dialogue of loss and desire that lays bare not only 'the true worth of one's own skin,' but also its true nature, its nerve, its revelatory grace and danger transfigured by the poet’s touch. Here the sharp light of the storied, the wedding ring of the widowed amputee, the 'baptismal of pearlescent light,' make visible our place in a story that remains, like a body, defiantly singular, summoning, unresolved. Everywhere we look we find the amorous in the elegiac, the 'steel wind' in the leaves, our one true home in 'their radiant perishing.' A fierce and moving book."
"Crave reminds us of the 'hard evidence' of our lives. Attentive to images of the natural world and through a range of voices and stories, Gelineau's poems at turns unmask the fear and failings that lead to violence and at others confront illness and death with a hard-eyed stare, leading to such paradoxical punches as this one: 'it's exactly the fact that you could die/that lets you forget you will die.' Yet 'blessings' radiate equally in this collection: love as known in the births of children or in a long marriage, gratitude for the 'gifts' of the present, and compassion as tangible in 'what men [and women] do when they live up to what is owed.'"
Lee Upton
Bruce Bond
Shara McCallum
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