She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes: Poems (May Swenson Poetry Award Series)

The seventh volume in the Swenson Award series, She Took Off Her Wings and Shoes is the first to bring the avant-garde to the series. Frequently multivocal, these poems juxtapose characters, times, and places by inventively varying fonts, spacings, type size, and other formal features of the printed page. Eclectic in subject, the book explores the meanings of both mythic and personal experience. The result is an energetic poetic sense in a tradition that goes back to Apollinaire, that finds as much to work with in the conventions of type as in the passions of the human heart. "Deeply personal, extravagantly public art. It is experimental in ways that May Swenson would have applauded." -- Alicia Ostriker, poet "This lovely contest winner will speak to women as surely as poets have spoken to the author, Suzette Marie Bishop. And the poets do speak to her. Much of her work is inspired by the work of others. With an eye and pen for detail, readers looking for poetry with a delicate touch are certain to love Bishop's book." --Carolyn Howard-Johnson "This is a deep, resonant, and rewarding collection; the gradual unfolding of its take on luck becomes, by the book's final lines, thrilling, as the stacked-up imagery of the previous 70 pages--bats, Rome, ruins, gynecological procedure, houses, cacti--spill over into a kind of juxtapositional grand-finale . . . If you don't believe poetry can be resonant and thrilling, this is the book to change your mind." Sean Chadwell, LareDOS "I am often accompanied by a great blue heron, which has haunted me from the time I first read Suzette Bishop's collection of poetry, She Took Off Her Wings & Shoes . . . when it rose from the pages on massive wings. This mystery bird does what Bishop's poems do for me (or to me), keeping me charmed, challenged, and, frankly rather tough, for one must be tough to read Bishop. Hers are poems of witness and speak of difficulties like mental illness, sexual violation, a hysterectomy, divorce, homelessness. In all, these poems are honest and unflinching, and they ask the same of us. They are also poems that do whatever they want, and this is something I particularly love about them . . . No camp owns these poems. They are experimental and collagistic, with startling splices of disparate discourse. They are distanced but also confessional. They are feminist but also feminine, with a delicacy imparting the feel of secrets shared by teenaged girls." Nancy Dunlop, 13th Moon "She writes with her tongue and her fingertip . . . she hears each word before she sees it." The New Formalist Foreword / Alicia Ostriker -- Do Not Drive Into Smoke -- Reaching For Your Hair -- Disruptions -- Elegant Shrimp In Champagne Sauce -- My Dream House -- House-sitting -- Knowing Objects Will Outlast Them -- My Gown Is A Momentary Outline -- Dragons -- The Bat -- One Summer -- Exit Interview -- Melinda -- Horrorscope -- Graveyard -- Visiting Relatives -- Mirror And Sword Trick -- In The Holy Spirit Research Center -- Least Terns -- Bloodstone -- Water Moccasin -- Anasazi Bowl -- Do Not Drive Into Smoke -- Wedding Triptych -- Cool Wagons & Bone Chandeliers -- Through The Corridor -- Departing Iceland -- As Good There As Here To Burn -- At The Ramada Inn With Ruth And Esther -- Emitting A Sound -- Conversation With Anne Truitt -- The Conservator -- Purple Gloxinia -- Hannah Hoch -- Beneath Eva Hesse's Fiberglass Veil -- Photograph Of Edna St. Vincent Millay -- Sor Juana Ines De La Cruz -- The Ghost Of Christina Rossetti -- As Good There As Here To Burn -- She Took Off Her Wings And Shoes -- She Took Off Her Wings And Shoes (a Long Poem) -- The May Swenson Poetry Award. By Suzette Marie Bishop. Suzette Marie Bishop teaches writing at Texas A & M International University. This will be her first full-length book, though she's published a chapbook and many individual poems in national poetry journals. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Ms. Bishop's credits include publications in Antioch Review, 13th Moon, Eratica, Aries, The Little Magazine, and many other literary journals. As a poet and writing teacher on the faculty of Texas A & M International, she gives many readings, as well as workshops for gifted children, seniors, and other writers on the US-Mexico border; she has worked with at-risk youth and with the rural Hispanic community May Swenson Poetry Award Volume 7, with foreward by Alicia Ostriker. Nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, Ms. Bishop's credits include publications in Antioch Review, 13th Moon, Eratica, Aries, The Little Magazine, and many other literary journals. As a poet and writing teacher, she gives many readings, as well as workshops for gifted children, seniors, and other writers on the US-Mexico border; she has worked with at-risk youth and with the rural Hispanic community