About this ebook
Poems on the power of memory and the shading of past into present
In this enthralling collection, National Book Award finalist and former Poet Laureate of California Carol Muske-Dukes composes a lyrical autobiography, tracing her family history from the Dakota prairie to her new life as a young mother in Los Angeles. In “The Separator,” Muske-Dukes writes of her grandfather, a wheat farmer, winnowing, threshing, planting a future in the deep black soil of Wyndmere, North Dakota. In “Biglietto d’Ingresso,” she recalls a perfect day in Tuscany, spent with her future husband in a town overlooking a wine valley. “August, Los Angeles, Lullaby” is a lulling yet harrowing description of the wonder of a mother holding her newborn child—and her own fragility, encountering mortality—as a hummingbird touches the hourglass of the feeder outside the window . . . then is gone.
In this enthralling collection, National Book Award finalist and former Poet Laureate of California Carol Muske-Dukes composes a lyrical autobiography, tracing her family history from the Dakota prairie to her new life as a young mother in Los Angeles. In “The Separator,” Muske-Dukes writes of her grandfather, a wheat farmer, winnowing, threshing, planting a future in the deep black soil of Wyndmere, North Dakota. In “Biglietto d’Ingresso,” she recalls a perfect day in Tuscany, spent with her future husband in a town overlooking a wine valley. “August, Los Angeles, Lullaby” is a lulling yet harrowing description of the wonder of a mother holding her newborn child—and her own fragility, encountering mortality—as a hummingbird touches the hourglass of the feeder outside the window . . . then is gone.
About the author
Carol Muske-Dukes is the author of eight books of poems, four novels, and two essay collections, and is an editor of two anthologies, including Crossing State Lines: An American Renga, which she coedited with Bob Holman. Many of her books have been New York Times Notable selections. Muske-Dukes is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Southern California, where she founded the PhD program in creative writing and literature, and she recently fulfilled her appointment as poet laureate of California, appointed by the governor’s office. Her poetry collection Sparrow was a National Book Award finalist and she is a six-time Pushcart Prize winner. She writes for the New York Times Book Review and the New York Times op-ed page, the Los Angeles Times, the Huffington Post, and the New Yorker’s Page-Turner blog. Her poems have been published and anthologized widely, including in several editions of Best American Poetry. Muske-Dukes has been the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Library of Congress award, Barnes & Noble’s Writer for Writers Award, and many other honors. She lives in Southern California and New York.
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