Cold Pastoral
Regular price
€17.99
A searing, urgent collection of poems that brings the lyric and documentary together in unparalleled ways--unmasking and examining the specter of manmade disaster. The explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig. Hurricane Katrina. The Flint water crisis. Thousands dead, lives destroyed, and a natural world imperiled by human choices. This is the litany of our time--and these are the events that Rebecca Dunham traces, passionately and brilliantly, in Cold Pastoral. In poems that incorporate interviews and excerpts from government documents and other sources--poems that adopt the pastoral and elegiac traditions in a landscape where "I can't see the bugs; I don't hear the birds"--Dunham finds the intersection between moral witness and shattering art. Experimental and incisive, Cold Pastoral is a collection that reveals what poetry can--and, perhaps, should--be, reflecting ourselves and our world back with gorgeous clarity.
Rebecca Dunham is the author of three previous books of poetry: Glass Armonica, winner of Milkweed Editions' 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize; The Flight Cage; and The Miniature Room, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize. She has been the recipient of an NEA Fellowship and was the 2005--6 Jay C. and Ruth Halls Fellow in Poetry at the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and lives in Madison, Wisconsin.