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Still Falling: Poems
Current price:
$16.80
Publication Date: May 2nd, 2023
Publisher:
Graywolf Press
ISBN:
9781644452318
Pages:
72
Usually Ships in 1 to 5 Days
Description
A searching new collection by a poet who “pays exquisite attention to everything she encounters” (The Washington Post)
Still Falling expands on Jennifer Grotz’s precise sense of craft and voice to investigate new territory in this astonishing collection. These poems are emotionally raw and introspective, exploring the profound capaciousness of grief. Grotz carefully and deftly carries the weight of losses and their aftermaths—the deaths of the poet’s mentors, friends, and mother; the endings of relationships; and the enclosures of a life spent in attendance to the world in a state of wanting rather than truly living. Here also are poems that movingly and crucially decide what dedicating one’s life to poetry might require.
But in the wake of painful loss, Grotz writes toward “this world, the living.” Her poems reveal and meditate on the paradoxical relationship between the literal and the figurative, at the heart of poetry itself, like the darkness and light of Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro. Still Falling is a book to be read slowly, calling readers back into the stillness of being, finding hope, “not death / where darkness and silence and dust are / only darkness and silence and dust.”
Praise for Still Falling: Poems
"You pick up a Jennifer Grotz book because you want to hear that voice again, and again. She’s making some of the finest work of our times. Maybe it’s no surprise, then, given these times, that her newest sweep of poems— Still Falling—is a cataract of grief, a cascade of elegy that is as quietly ecstatic as it is undaunted, steady, loving life as it mourns."—Jesse Nathan, McSweeney's
"In her book’s final poem, Grotz, Director of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, quotes Robert Frost without mentioning his name. . . . Frost dismisses the question with a casually calculated—and very catchy—Yankeeism, but Grotz doesn’t take the easy exit. Instead, her poem, 'In Sicily,' like so many of the others in Still Falling, nudges at and beyond the edges of perception in language that is gratifyingly grounded in the real world."—David Starkey, California Review of Books
“Still Falling is an undeniably gorgeous book of love poems full of grief. In these pages, Jennifer Grotz writes line after line of direct statement in rhythms that would leave any reader breathless and wanting more: ‘I will call desert this kingdom that you were, / sun this loneliness. I will say / wasp to name the fear.’ I am in awe of Grotz’s power to grow and transform book after book. I cannot read Still Falling without crying.”—Jericho Brown
"Still Falling is sure to resonate for nearly all readers, as each of us carries into the collection our own losses and our own desperate need to calm."—The Poetry Question
“Bestowing many moving and lyrical insights, this deserves to be read slowly and compassionately.”—Publishers Weekly
"Coming from deep inside, these poems work by free association, often alluding to falling rain, snow, and even sunlight pouring onto a surface, all of which add a spiritual resonance to these hypnotic and meditative poems."—Diane Schraper, Library Journal
