A01=Elise Paschen
american poet
animal world
author
Author_Elise Paschen
beasts
Category=DC
contemporary poetry collection
death
domestic
earth
emotional
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
experimental writing
grief
healing
human
imagery
journey
life
literary poems
loss of parents
love
marriage
metaphor
motherhood
raising a family
symbolism
use of language
Product details
- ISBN 9781597091312
- Weight: 113g
- Dimensions: 152 x 228mm
- Publication Date: 14 May 2009
- Publisher: Red Hen Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
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“The poems in Elise Paschen’s Bestiary explore domestic preoccupations set against the backdrop of the wild-heartedness, real and imagined, of the animal world,” praises the poet Jason Shinder. In this modern-day Bestiary, or “Book of Beasts,” the line between animal and human is thinly-drawn – the daughter of a Celtic king, through love, is transformed from beast to human; lovers take flight as moon and owl; manatees transform, before the explorers’ eyes, into mermaids. This dynamic runs throughout the collection: taking flight, hovering between air and earth, plunging, and then resurfacing from water. The poems create a constant engagement between what tethers us to our daily lives – marriage, motherhood, raising a family, the loss of parents in old age – and the desire for other worlds. Exploring notions of transformation, these poems cross thresholds between animal and human, between death and life.
Award-winning poet, Elise Paschen, creates in her third and most complex poetry collection, work which is elegant and passionate, preternaturally still and reckless all at once. Paschen displays a variety of form and nuance – from ghazals to long-lined free verse poems. Writing out of a distinct Western literary tradition, but tapping into her Native American (Osage) roots, Paschen celebrates the mythic, the unusual, the magical glimpsed in the everyday.
