Böcker av Kathy Fagan

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a fatal diagnosis, how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body meant to bend & breed opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our common griefs so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like thesea dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a child who wont ever get born: with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. You think your one life preciousAnd Bad Hobby thinkshard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us. And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. Dont worry, baby, Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. Were okay.

In this stunning fourth collection, Kathy Fagan expands her ongoing engagement with voice and persona across the borders of both traditional and experimental poetic lines. In Lip, a book of monologues, portraits, and arias, Fagan directs our attention to the sometimes literal ropes and pulleys of the human stage, those operating just out of sight and earshot: the understructure and the undervoice. Her speakershistorical, anonymous, and often subversively femalevariously hold forth, hold back, enfold, and unleash in forms as multiply textured as their experience. Always, hovering at the mouth of the vessel, in the margin of speech, is lip: anatomical and botanical, sexual and slang, servile and insolent.