Foxglovewise: Poems [Hardcover]

Ange Mlinko, whose poetry is irresistible (Los Angeles Review of Books), opens our perception of other lives, or lives unlived.

Foxglovewiseis, at its core, a response to the singular experience of the loss of ones parents. It begins at an Eastern Orthodox Epiphany ritual in Florida and ends in a cemetery in Los Angeles. Yet, as with Ange Mlinkos other books of poetry, the collection uses geography as a trope for the ways in which we try to map out our lives and make them legible, even as poetry, music, and paintings suggest that much of what happens, or matters, to us is not on the maps (not to mention the apps). Whether its Europa borne over the waves, or gravestones bearing aliases rather than birth names, or books bequeathed to us by relatives in languages we cant read, we live up in the air or on the wing and not in fixed coordinates.

Mlinko's poetry is suffused with wit, erudition, beauty, and boundless energy. As Declan Ryan wrote of her work inThe Times Literary Supplement, A reader could be merely dazzled by all this surface stylishness . . . but then they would miss the heart beneath it all.Foxglovewiseis a direct line to the authors heart.

Ange Mlinkois the author of several books of poetry, includingDistant Mandate,Marvelous Things Overheard, andVenice. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Randall Jarrell Award in Criticism, and she has served as poetry editor forThe Nation. Her essays and reviews have been published inThe Nation,London Review of Books,The New York Review of Books,Poetry, andParnassus. Educated at St. Johns College and Brown University, she has lived in Morocco and Lebanon, and is currently a professor of English at the University of Florida in Gainesville, where she lives.

The lushness is late romantic; these poems 'vintage is Keatsian,' loading every rift with ore. . . . Tlã0