Luminous Blue Variables: and Other Major Poems [Paperback]

This collection gathers major poems from Michelle Boisseau’s previous collectionsA Sunday in God Years, Trembling Air, Understory, No Private Life,andIndian Summer, as well as uncollected poems and interview excerpts from her three appearances on the nationally syndicagted public radio programNew Letters on the Air."I always said Michelle Boisseau was tough. InLuminous Blue Variables:and Other Major Poems, she stands witness to our guilt, cruelty, and inherent sadness. '[H]ow little of history / is ever reeled in and put away.' Of whom or what does she not speak? Pliny the Elder, the Stasi and the Berlin Wall, Voltaire, slavery, the Gestapo, her father, and, in a language that glistens, Danaë in her “tower of light”—the golden rain. Moving from the personal to the universal and back again, she shows, with an exquisite eye for detail, how 'One life is so small its story fits everywhere.' A wonderful read."
—Alice Friman"My great friend in poetry for 40 years, Michelle and I shared a love of baseball, fathers in radio, and often an ambition for a longer symphonic poem that fully explored concepts and the permutations of imagery as they formed and amplified core emotion and thought.  But always I admired her talent, equaled by few, for precision and economy in the longer forms that boosted the signal of the poem and made it resonate.  I admired her poetic acumen which so subtly drove the poems, and especially her fierce and unflinching intelligence that produced and joined engaging images that took on larger metaphysical problems as well as our mortality. We both were survivors of Catholic school, yet somehow retained a subtext that attracted us to cosmology, what that might suggest about a life beyond the planet, or not.  And yet, all her poems are accessible, grounded with specifics and a deep, compelling humanity that speak honestly to us for all ls