The Mouths of Grazing Things
Jennifer Boyden
The Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Ronald Wallace, General Editor
Winner of the 2010 Brittingham Prize in Poetry, selected by Robert Pinsky
The Mouths of Grazing Things is an unflinching, lyrical meditation on nature's forced exodus from the human, and the forms of longing,
estrangement, magnetism, and self-otherness that ensue. Arrestingly tender and fiercely protective of where nature lurks in and out of us still, Boyden translates for a new landscape where a brain in a jar is anchored by an apple, a fly-tying fisherman finds love songs to fish scattered among the barber's sweepings, and the players at "the most dangerous playground in the world" prepare for anything with one fist clenched and the other full of sugar. In poems built to survive an unsafe journey, this book delivers the now-beyond, the almost-was, the near-forgotten, and the just-in-time.
I dedicate this fly to the fish
of the fallen river. It is a poem
of hook and shank and feather.
It sinks like a bone, casts
like the logic of knives.
The song of my own hair, it is
how I call them from their stones.
—excerpt from “The Fly Tier's Monomania”
© The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. All rights reserved.
"In a clear, muscular language loaded with precise revealing metaphor, Jennifer Boyden delivers a world. These are poems of a mature poet deeply engaged with her environment, demonstrating again and again the power of language to surprise and delight in moments of true
insight."—Sam Hamill
 Jennifer Boyden, a Minnesota native, lives in Washington State and teaches literature and writing. Her poetry has appeared in
journals such as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, Cimarron Review, and The
Mid-American Review. Boyden's awards
include the PEN Northwest writing residency and a Washington State Artist Trust Grant. This is her first full-length collection.
Media & bookseller inquiries regarding review copies, events, and interviews can be directed to the publicity department at publicity@uwpress.wisc.edu or (608) 263-0734. (If you want to examine a book for possible course use, please see our Course Books page. If you want to examine a book for possible rights licensing, please see Rights & Permissions.) |
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March 2010
LC: 2009039720 PS
80 pp. 6 x 9
“Delightful, that such complexity of mind should be given to us in such lucid packages."
—Albert Goldbarth
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