Melissa Kwasny's Books

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

By: Melissa Kwasny

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Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

By: Melissa Kwasny

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today comprises two interwoven series—one of linked prose poems called “Another Letter to the Soul” and one of individual lined poems that explore the connection between anima and animal. The volume speaks to and questions the ancient concept of the soul and its contemporary manifestations, including the damaged soul, the American soul, and the blind, gagged soul of history. Melissa Kwasny does not define the soul in traditional religious terms, but in a shamanic, perhaps ecological sense, as the part of being that continues its existence after death. The poems in “Another Letter to the Soul” point inward, addressing the human soul directly, while the individual lined poems search outward, sensing the soul in the plants, animals, rocks, waters, and winds that surround us.

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University of Washington Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0295742453

ISBN 13

9780295742458

The Cloud Path

Poems

By: Melissa Kwasny

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The Cloud Path

Poems

By: Melissa Kwasny

An imaginative reworking of the elegy that focuses on the difficult work of being with the dying. At the heart of The Cloud Path, celebrated author Melissa Kwasny’s seventh collection of poetry, lies the passing of her beloved mother: the caretaking, the hospice protocols, the last breath, the aftermath. Simultaneously, she must also reckon with an array of global crises: environmental decline, the arrival of a pandemic, divisive social tensions. With so much loss building up around her, Kwasny turns to the natural world for guidance, walking paths lined with aspen, snow geese, and prickly pears. “I have come here for their peace and instructions,” she writes, listening to the willows, the “slant rhyme of their multi-limbed clatter.” What she finds is a new, more seasoned kind of solace. The Cloud Path glimmers with nature’s many lively colors—the “burnt orange” of foxes, “cedar / bark cast in the greenest impasto,” white swans intertwined. It also embraces the world’s harsher elements—a dark bog’s purple stench, a hayfield empty of birds. Witnessing life’s constant ebb and flow, the weight of personal and collective grief gradually becomes lighter. The shapes of clouds, cattle bones by the river. “Why not,” she asks, “believe it matters? Evocative and wrenching, The Cloud Path compels us to consider the whole of living and dying. An elegant juxtaposition of personal and planetary loss, these keen and tender poems teach us to see afresh in the lateness of things.

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Milkweed Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

1639550933

ISBN 13

9781639550937

Putting on the Dog

The Animal Origins of What We Wear

By: Melissa Kwasny

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Putting on the Dog

The Animal Origins of What We Wear

By: Melissa Kwasny

In Putting on the Dog, Melissa Kwasny explores the age-old relationship between humans and the animals that have provided us with our clothing: leather, wool, silk, feathers, pearls, and fur. From silkworms grown on plantations in Japan and mink farms off Denmark’s western coast to pearl beds in the Sea of Cortés, Kwasny offers firsthand accounts of traditions and manufacturing methods—aboriginal to modern—and descriptions of the marvel and miracle of the clothing itself. What emerges is a fresh look at the cultural history of fashion. Kwasny travels the globe to visit both large-scale industrial manufacturers and community-based, often subsistence production by people who have spent their lives working with animals—farmers, ranchers, tanners, weavers, shepherds, and artisans. She examines historical rates of consumption and efforts to move toward sustainability, all while considering animal welfare, worker safety, environmental health, product accountability, and respect for indigenous knowledge and practice. At its heart, Putting on the Dog demonstrates how what we choose to wear represents one of our most profound engagements with the natural world.

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244

Publisher

Trinity University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1595348654

ISBN 13

9781595348654

The Nine Senses

By: Melissa Kwasny

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The Nine Senses

By: Melissa Kwasny

The prize-winning author of Thistle shares “a quietly magnificent collection of prose poems” that explore how we connect to the world around us (Orion). Drawing inspiration from the work of Rene Char, Melissa Kwasny presents a new kind of prose poem in The Nine Senses. These experiments challenge the way we read sequentially, making each line equal to the next as disparate figures and topics appear side by side: Dylan Thomas, Roman water lines, Paul Celan, Shirin Neshat, anti-depressants, Buddhism, William Carlos Williams, Trakl, cancer, Beckett, Pound, Breton, the Iraq War, telekinesis, clairvoyance, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Yeats, among many others. Through it all, Kwasny asks how we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are? As bromides and aphorisms degrade, we are left with startling new realizations. Obliquely touching on the cancer of a friend, her own troubled relationship with her father, and the break-up of a nearly thirty-year partnership, Kwasny also questions mortality, temporality, and eternity. Kwasny then abandons abstraction with some very direct poems about her own cancer and diagnosis.

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113

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Milkweed Editions

Published Date

ISBN 10

1571318321

ISBN 13

9781571318329

The Nine Senses

By: Melissa Kwasny

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The Nine Senses

By: Melissa Kwasny

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113

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Milkweed Editions

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ISBN 10

1571318321

ISBN 13

9781571318329

Putting on the Dog

The Animal Origins of What We Wear

By: Melissa Kwasny

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Putting on the Dog

The Animal Origins of What We Wear

By: Melissa Kwasny

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244

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Trinity University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1595348654

ISBN 13

9781595348654

Pictograph

Poems

By: Melissa Kwasny

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Pictograph

Poems

By: Melissa Kwasny

The prize-winning poet evokes the spirit of nature in this collection inspired by the sacred sites around her rural Montana home. “If you would learn the earth as it really is,” N. Scott Momaday writes, “learn it through its sacred places.” With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites across Montana. In Pictograph, she captures the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging. Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that “we make a sign and we receive.” Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating “a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here.”

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ISBN 10

1571319085

ISBN 13

9781571319081

The Cloud Path

Poems

By: Melissa Kwasny

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The Cloud Path

Poems

By: Melissa Kwasny

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ISBN 10

1639550933

ISBN 13

9781639550937

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

By: Melissa Kwasny

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Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

By: Melissa Kwasny

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University of Washington Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0295742453

ISBN 13

9780295742458

Pictograph

Poems

By: Melissa Kwasny

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Pictograph

Poems

By: Melissa Kwasny

If you would learn the earth as it really is,” N. Scott Momaday writes, learn it through its sacred places.” With this quote as her guiding light, Melissa Kwasny traveled to the ancient pictograph and petroglyph sites around her rural Montana home. The poems in this collection emerge from these visits and capture the natural world she encounters around the sacred art, filling it with new, personal meaning: brief glimpses of starlight through the trees become a reminder of the impermanence of life, the controlled burn of a forest a sign of the changes associated with aging. Unlike traditional nature poets, however, Kwasny acknowledges the active spirit of each place, agreeing that, we make a sign and we receive.” Not only do we give meaning to nature, Kwasny suggests, but nature gives meaning to us. As the collection closes, the poems begin to coalesce into a singular pictograph, creating a fading language that might be a bridge to our existence here.”

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ISBN 10

1571314628

ISBN 13

9781571314628

Book's by Melissa Kwasny

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

The Cloud Path

The Cloud Path

Putting on the Dog

Putting on the Dog

The Nine Senses

The Nine Senses

The Nine Senses

The Nine Senses

Putting on the Dog

Putting on the Dog

Pictograph

Pictograph

The Cloud Path

The Cloud Path

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

Where Outside the Body Is the Soul Today

Pictograph

Pictograph

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