In a series of passionate, profound, often humorous, observations, Kelly Cherry explores the art of writing, its relationship to place, and its importance in our lives. "I have never written a 'travel essay, '" Cherry says, but her travels inform her poetry and fiction. Now, seeking to understand what it means to write from any particular place, she charts a course in creative nonfiction prose. From Cleveland to Yalta, Wisconsin to Latvia, England to the Arizona desert or the Philippines, she writes as a way of knowing the world. Along the way we become acquainted with the author herself, whose parents were string quartet violinists. They didn't go to church and, caught up in a rehearsal, sometimes forgot to put dinner on the table, but there was always music in the house (or the tenement flat). Cherry recalls warmly the stories of her childhood: "I don't know whether or not there's a God," her mother would say, "but I know there was a Beethoven, and that's good enough for me." And always there was writing. As young writers do, Cherry earned her living at a variety of jobs--creating fictional histories of overseas orphans for their U.S. sponsors; editing and writing religious textbooks; a stint as a visiting professor in southwest Minnesota, where, in order to live in the dormitory, the only housing practicable for someone without a car, she had to enroll simultaneously as a student (she took astronomy). And in the evenings, the mornings, and other stolen moments, she wrote--as she does now--to create beauty from a specific kind of knowledge, the knowledge we acquire by creating beauty. Cherry explores what it means to be a Southern writer and a woman writer, and discusses the changing face of the profession of writing. "To be a writer in America is to be marginal," she notes, adding that perhaps the best place for a serious writer to reside is "on the edge, outside looking in." You seek to know what it means to be living where you are, and that search is, for a writer, a searching out of language. That quest is, for a writer, a questioning. For a writer, beauty and knowledge begin in the same place. With its brilliant insights and beautiful language, Writing the World is an eloquent meditation on what it means to be a writer. Like Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Eudora Welty's One Writer's Beginnings, Cherry's Writing the World will be a lasting inspiration for anyone who has ever dreamed of being a writer.
Lyrical beauty and power, imposing metaphor, and thought both deep and precise are hallmarks of Kelly Cherry’s poetry, on view in Hazard and Prospect: New and Selected Poems. With a dazzling mastery and range of tone, technique, form, and ideas, Cherry presents a lifetime of powerful writing that coheres into a single, seamless work. In it she responds to the natural world, to philosophical dilemmas, to spiritual longing, to political, ethical, and aesthetic questions, and, most powerfully, to love and loss. She shows us in sometimes searing poems where the hazards lie, and in transcendent verse a new, bright prospect, a “green place” on a farm in Virginia where time slows and holds and happiness abides.
If religious poetry may be thought of as a great river fed, in the English language, by two main streams—the devotional tradition, leading in recent times to Anne Sexton and John Berryman, and the contrastingly philosophical tradition, exemplified by William Blake—it is to the latter that this new book by Kelly Cherry belongs. In the poems of God’s Loud Hand, Cherry conducts—often not at all devotionally, often with an honesty that precludes the emphasis on self that tends to be present in devotional poetry (“Lord save me,” “Lord forgive me,” “Lord help me”)—a metaphorical investigation of the theological ideas. These are fiercely intellectual poems, which, in the way of T.S. Eliot, are more akin in their stringent analysis to Tillich or Niebuhr, perhaps, than to someone like Simone Weil. At their base in a willingness to ask Abraham’s great question, “Shall not the Judge of all the earth judge wisely?” This intellectual boldness reveals itself in a formal argumentation rare in contemporary poetry. Like Donne or Hopkins, Kelly Cherry defines her terms, orders her points logically—no vagary or sentimentality appears here. The result of such exactitude is a kind of clarity, a grace, that seems to lift the poems off the page, to cause them to rise, make their own kind of ascension. It is as if these poems were larks—an exaltation of larks, as they say—that rise each morning to heaven’s gate, but instead of singing hymns, they sing philosophy’s own music. And in what a remarkable variety of keys, what a range of modes and moods. From the opening poems of historical and mythological drama, through the passionate love songs of the second sections, through the dark night of the soul that takes place in the third, to the orchestral outburst of the final group of poems—poetry celebrating its own freedom ot be poetry—in all these parts (“a chorus of lyrics,” one might say) there is a symphonic unity that astonishes, an ode to joy.
In January, 1965, in the café of the Hotel Metropol, in Moscow, the young American poet Kelly Cherry met the young Latvian composer Imant Kalnin. They fell in love—and began an alliance of the heart and mind sustained over twenty-five years in the face of threats from the Central Committee, surveillance by the KGB, confiscation of mail by censors, and eve “disinformation.” Their passionate friendship, growing out of a recognition of each other’s artistic destiny, also survived the hazards of other relationships—romantic and familial—and the professional demands of two careers, and sheer distance. There was more at stake here than just love. Or maybe just love is exactly what this romance was about: the deeply felt attempt to learn whether and why and how to love justly. What can love mean, when the world in which it is expressed and experienced is corrupt? In The Exiled Heart, Kelly Cherry takes on that profound question, seeking answers to it at every level—theological, political, artistic, personal. In this book that is in the great tradition of Dostoevsky and Anna Akhmatova and at the same time startlingly original and American, she translates experience into a work of classic dimensions. Interpreting in extraordinary prose her firsthand encounters with Latvia and Latvians, describing a weekend at an underground hotel in Leningrad, or recounting misadventures with the Soviet consulate in London (the same cast kept changing characters), she pursues a philosophical quest. The Exiled Heart is a nonfiction narrative journey that, of necessity, makes metaphorical excursions into philosophical territory as Cherry reflects on the nature of justice, the idea of utopia, morality in art, the meaning of despair, the problem of suffering, the possibility of forgiveness. As the author explains in the first chapter, “I didn’t know, in 1965, where that train was taking me: to Moscow, I thought, but equally to my heart and my conscience. This book is a kind of log, a moral travelogue if you will, of a course that was set then and there, deep into heartland.” These brilliantly conceived and beautifully written side trips broaden an autobiographical story into a tale of political exile and personal covenant that is almost a paradigm for the history of the Cold War and for the faith in the future that has always led people and nations to strive for independence. Beginning with a girl and a boy in a Moscow café, in the end this stunning book is about nothing less that the soul’s search for freedom.
Kelly Cherry, who studied philosophy in graduate school at the University of Virginia, has never lost her deep love of the subject; The Retreats of Thought takes the reader through the philosophical domain. What do we really know of our world? Why is there anything at all? What is time? What is a person? What is mind? What are goodness and beauty? What does the artist seek? These and other problems are shrewdly examined in Cherry’s passionate, skeptical, witty, and sometimes wry poems. Cherry places herself in the pragmatic tradition of philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce but admits to Platonic longings.
Winner of the 2013 L. E. Phillabaum Poetry Award In her ninth collection of poetry, Kelly Cherry explores the domain of language. Clear and accessible, the poems in The Life and Death of Poetry examine the intricacies and limitations of communication and its ability to help us transcend our world and lives. The poet begins with silence and animal sound before taking on literature, public discourse, and the particular art of poetry. The sequence "Welsh Table Talk" considers the unsaid, or unsayable, as a man, his daughter, and his daughter's friend sojourn on Bardsey Island in Wales with the father's female companion. The innocence and playful chatter of the children throw into sharp relief a desolate landscape and failed communication between the adults. In the book's final section, Cherry considers translation, great art's grand sublimity, and the relation of poetry -- the divine tongue -- to the everyday world. Witty, poignant, wise, and joyous, The Life and Death of Poetry offers a masterful new collection from an accomplished poet.
Kelly Cherry's tenth work of fiction delivers twelve compelling stories about women of the American South. These are women struggling to find their way through the everyday workings of life while also navigating the maze of self. From a young woman's nightmare piano lesson to an elderly woman's luminous last breath, Twelve Women in a Country Called America takes readers on a journey sometimes dark, sometimes funny, and always enlightening.
With Rising Venus Kelly Cherry reveals the fearsome beauty, vulnerability, and complexity of women’s experience. Cherry masterfully re-creates the full spectrum of the female psyche, from looming madness to harrowing self-knowledge made bearable, even exhilarating, through the poet’s remarkable range and skill. The book’s journey is an ascension from mysterious and overwhelming depths of despair and anguish to a place of peace and perspective. Beginning with “Adult Ed. 101: Basic Home Repair for Single Women,” Cherry asserts, “Ladies, you are about to find out / just how much really rough / weather / your house can take.” Probing the emotional extremes of woman’s life as daughter, mother, wife, lover, and working woman, poems like “Lady Macbeth on the Psych Ward” open a frightening chasm beneath the reader, yet steady and reassure with the bravura of poetic compression. That fearless art inhabits the role of “An Other Woman” and then explores the status of woman as aesthetic object, whether of the male gaze, cultural perception, or her own observation: “she sees the long-haired girl she used to be, / in boots and mini-dress, apart and watchful / as in a redoubt, in a room in a painting in / a room, or as if in a poem turned inside out” (“The Model Looks at Her Portrait: A Retrospective”). A passionate turbulence gives way to acute and delicate observations on art and myth and strikingly original insights into tradition and context. Thus, in “Sunrise,” “A sky as blue as if it were / The backdrop for a Renaissance / View of the Ascension” becomes a representation of that miracle, itself figured by the miracle of dawn, “a morning / Risen from the night.” The title poem revises the classic view of Venus to speak of another miraculous ascension, a woman’s hard- earned rise into her own sense of self: “Myth is the portal / through which we pass, / becoming human at last, / rising out of dream / and desire to realms / of reality, where love, / a woman, by Jove, / survives, strong and free, / engendering her own destiny.”
In this, her latest, deeply moving collection, Kelly Cherry confronts the basic questions of love and death, faith and suffering. From her search for “a new poetry”—one that can face up to the worst barbarities of the twentieth century—Cherry wrests a passionate, authoritative, powerful vision that is itself transfiguring. Death and Transfiguration focuses on the wisdom one gains from pain rather than on the pain itself. Cherry, betraying no fear, grasps her anguish to see how much she can stand. Dedication, tenacity, and spiritual poise are needed to make precise observations of this kind in the most trying times. In Death and Transfiguration, Cherry demonstrates how such displacements of the mind carry with them their own analeptic. “Requiem,” the collection’s long closing poem, gathers all of these deaths in a single embrace. This spectacular piece, emotionally akin to Anna Akhmatova’s poem of the same title but as closely and brilliantly reasoned as philosophy, transforms everything that has gone before, creating a strong, unified work.
“Robert Oppenheimer was a complex human being. No biography yet written comes even close to this elegant skein of poems in capturing his life and character.”—Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer records in poetry the life and times of one of America’s best-known scientists, the father of the atomic bomb who later lobbied for containment of nuclear weaponry. In brief, elegant stanzas, Kelly Cherry examines Oppenheimer’s inspirations, dreams, and values, visiting the events, places, and people that inspired him or led him to despair. She finds his place among scientists of his own time, such as Alan Turing and Albert Einstein, as well as his connections with historical and mythological figures from John Donne to Persephone. “Of course he had blood on his hands. Who did not?” says Cherry, in “The Nature of War.” Again and again in the course of this remarkable poem, Cherry’s narration of Oppenheimer’s life compels her readers to contemplate the vagaries of science, guilt, and our responsibilities to each other. “Quartet for J. Robert Oppenheimer is a book length poem in which the architect of the atom bomb comes to embody America and the West’s Faustian control of nature and the paradoxical helplessness and guilt which that control entailed. Oppenheim is marvelous, complicated, flawed and admirable character, and these poems read like chapters in a novel without in any way abandoning the intensities of feeling and image or delight in language we associate with lyric poetry. A terrific achievement and a compelling read.”—Alan Shapiro, author of Life Pig and Reel to Reel
In the Bolivian backcountry, a band of inept guerrillas begins a revolution that unexpectedly snow-balls into a wildcat worldwide movement. First, a shady German industrialist, with an obsession for big deals and big women, devises a scheme to expand the revolt into all of South America. Then the president of the United States embraces the overthrow as part of a vast Western Hemisphere plan. When irate citizens in Tulsa, New York, and London get involved, along with the queen mother and the pope, the insurrection takes on global - and even cosmic - dimensions. First published in 1983, Kelly Cherry's political cartoon of a novel offers a captivating cast of characters whose zany doings make an important point about the indomitable power of the human spirit to dream a better future.
Kelly Cherry wrestles with the complicated figure of J. Robert Oppenheimer, both the “father of the atomic bomb” and the flesh-and-blood man, from his early upbringing to his work with the Manhattan Project. Her poems explore his formation and education, coming inevitably to rest with his best-known achievement: “The atom would reveal / a power incommensurate with its size. / The skies would open their doors, the firmament shift. / A man would find and lose and find himself.” Kelly Cherry has previously published twenty books of fiction, poetry, and nonfiction, eight chapbooks, and translations of two classical plays. She was the first recipient of the Hanes Poetry Prize given by the Fellowship of Southern Writers for a body of work. Other awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Bradley Major Achievement (Lifetime) Award, a USIS Speaker Award (The Philippines), a Distinguished Alumnus Award, three Wisconsin Arts Board fellowships, the Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook Award for Distinguished Book of Stories in 1999 (2000), The Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, and selection as a Wisconsin Notable Author. Poet Laureate Emerita of Virginia and a member of the Electorate of Poets Corner at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York City, she is also Eudora Welty Professor Emerita of English and Evjue-Bascom Professor Emerita in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. She and her husband live in Virginia.
The seven stories in The Woman Who take a close and sharp look at the complex relationships between art and reality, between imagination and identity. They offer illuminating glimpses of that old and continuing mystery, the creating mind. Against nothingness, The Woman Who celebrates the flourishing creation, its ability to transfigure thought into object: the obj(r)t dOCOart, the story.
An outstanding collection of poetry about inventions and inventors, real and imagined, assembled by editor and poet, Bernadette Geyer, author of The Scabbard of Her Throat and a chapbook, What Remains. "I was awed by the seemingly endless number of ways that poets approached the subject. Naturally, there are poems about real inventions--from clocks to pantyhose to chemotherapy drugs--as well as poems that conjure fantastical inventions--such as a contraption for kissing and a happy marriage machine. While some of the poems in this anthology provide searing commentary on the dreadfulness of some of the creations birthed by inventors, other poems offer us a view into the stories behind inventions, as well as the lives of real and imagined inventors. Whether invoking humor, irony, historic research, or imagination, the poems in this anthology converse not only with each other, but also with their readers and the world at large, in service to the continued human drive to create solutions--even to problems we didn't know we had." -Bernadette Geyer Poems by Alex Dreppec, Brett Foster, Clare Louise Harmon, Daniel Hales, David Mook, Donald Illich, Dorene O'Brien, F. J. Bergmann, FJP Langheim, Gwen Hart, H.M. Jones, Holly Karapetkova, J.G. McClure, Janet McNally, Jean Bonin, Jerry Bradley, Jesseca Cornelson, Jessica Goodfellow, Jo Angela Edwins, Joel Allegretti, Julie E. Bloemeke, Karen Bovenmyer, Karen Skolfield, Kathryn Rickel, Keith Stevenson, Kelly Cherry, Kim Roberts, Kirsten Imani Kasai, Kristine Ong Muslim, Laura Shovan, Magus Magnus, Malka Older, Marcela Sulak, Marjorie Maddox, Mia Leonin, Nolan Liebert, Norbert Gora, Rie Sheridan Rose, Rikki Santer, Robert Kenny, Sarah Key, Scott Beal, Shelley Puhak, Steven Wingate, Susan Bucci Mockler, Tanis MacDonald, Tanya Bryan, Tricia Asklar, W. Luther Jett, William Minor, and William Winfield Wright
Is there any hope for a hypereducated thirty-year-old med student who would like nothing better than to be taken seriously sexually? That's what Mary Tennessee Settleworth, the dislocated heroine of this unsettling and wryly comic first novel, is wondering. Tennessee, a native of Knoxville, is an all-around heretic: a Southerner who's happier up North; a Christian who favors Pelagius and free will over Augustine and original sin; a lady of urgent passions who has had no carnal engagements for a year. She has finally gone so far as to write for a men's magazine an article titled Sexual Inmates: A Cellular Study. Before it is published, however, she enters the employ and the household of one Lulu Cameron Carlisle - a whining and possessive but philanthropic Park Avenue widow who has a fine suicidal flair for pot, heavy tranquilizers, and smoking in bed - and her lame fourteen-year-old daughter, who needs a governess. All three women are badly in need of a compassionate friend - preferably human and male - who is willing and most of all able to soothe both spirit and flesh. A just about perfect first novel - bright, sassy, sad, and with talent, well, to burn, said Kirkus (starred review). Publisher's Weekly said that what critics find so lacking in much feminist literature - humor, satire, genuine pathos - this literate novel about a young woman consistently displays. The Chicago Tribune Book World exclaimed, A flawless first novel? You gotta be kidding! No kidding. And John Barkham, writing in The Philadelphia Inquirer, announced, Ms. Cherry writes like a whiz. Boson Books also offers In The Wink of an Eye by Kelly Cherry. For an author bio and photo, reviews, and a reading sample, visit bosonbooks.com.
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