Bøger af Gale Marie Thompson

"In Mountain Amnesia, Thompson's poems rebuild a new world-and self-in the wake of destruction and loss. Influenced by the landscape of rural Appalachia, these poems depict a nature relentlessly working on its own disappearance for survival. Decaying plants and animal remains are housed in the same world as ramps and bellflowers on the cusp of blooming. These poems do not placate or cover up the inevitability of death, but rather use this knowledge to seek connection and make meaning: "how little and yet / how much it matters to count the dead." Mountain Amnesia seeks a path through destruction, using ruin to clear the way for new beginnings; or, as Thompson writes, "the painful, florid bloom of passing forward." This collection is a testament to survival and resilience, and animal encounters - the lonely fox, the folded fawn, the returning whale, the emerging voles - become new myths along the way. Mountain Amnesia also explores the question of how implicated or dependent we are on the lives and actions of others. What does it mean to be accountable to and responsible for those around you? How are we implicated in others' crimes? What can we do in the aftermath? The poems in this collection explore the limits of knowing and seeing, and how we come to be known and seen: "I ask the world for its bandage /of meaning." Mountain Amnesia both pursues and surrenders to these limits of knowing, narrowing the vast distances between ourselves and others"--

Helen or My Hunger is a looping, serial sequence that explores the relationship between memory, language, the body, and power. In dialogue with H.D.'s 1961 epic Helen in Egypt, these poems address the eidolon of Helen of Troy: the "echo of an echo." They question notions of beauty and the body by communicating with this absence, sustaining this unsustainable dialogue. Ghost? Icon? Mother? Friend? These poems address the ruptures of trauma, violence, with mythology and lineage, with the inevitable failings of gender and the body.The core of Helen or My Hunger contains, and at the same time rejects-tries to distract itself from-the material of the writer's life and body. These poems reckon with hunger, desire, and shame, and with the violence of language and representation (body as icon, as seat of trauma). Helen or My Hunger asks: how can we live in a world where both private and public pain resist language? How can we mark differences, but also make visible the samenesses? What violence do we sanction through language, through narrative, through form? In a sequence that resists its own formation, Helen or My Hunger wonders how to live in a world that seeks to reduce, to wound, what it cannot contain.

Poetry. Fascinated by what emerges from unlikely sources when absorbed into memory, Gale Marie Thompson's poems delight in what remains: John Wayne, Bewitched, turnip fields, camellias and canned figs, and--of course--kitchens. SOLDIER ON uses the light of the kitchen as a starting (and ending) point to explore remembered spaces, which take on new facets and textures in a flood of associations and the mind's endless cross-indexing. Inside a world of objects, people, and artifacts, SOLDIER ON constructs the language in which we love and lose love.