A01=Kathy Fagan
art
Author_Kathy Fagan
Category=DC
childhood
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
forthcoming
lgbtq poet
memory
mourning
parents
poem
poet
queer poet
woman poet
Product details
- ISBN 9781324131397
- Dimensions: 140 x 210mm
- Publication Date: 22 Sep 2026
- Publisher: WW Norton & Co
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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On a sketch of the Virgin and Child, Michelangelo instructed his young assistant, in shorthand Italian, to Draw faster, acknowledging that life lasts a moment, death–and art–far longer. As an aging, bi, childless poet currently recognising the limits of her own life and that of our planet, Kathy Fagan has immersed herself in the intimate and urgent discovery that growth and decay are the same cycle, and that art and memory, made in the tumultuous rush of these, are the deeply human attempts to outlast them.
Fagan’s luminous seventh collection, The Unbecoming, begins with the sequence “Listening to Others,” and a command, Run, into a process that is, for all of us, a circle of becoming and unbecoming simultaneously. Favouring perspective over nostalgia and clarity over certainty, the poems are, then, memento mori, a loving reminder, a poet’s reckoning with the rewards and losses of age and with our painfully beautiful little lives “rounded with a sleep.”
Kathy Fagan is the author of seven poetry collections including Bad Hobby, winner of the 2023 William Carlos Williams Award. A recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, Fagan is professor emerita of English at The Ohio State University.
