Laurel blossom biography
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In this wise, generous, heart-breaking book, 'Everything is elegy.'
--- Gary Young
Oct. 2015 • 978-1-935536-62-8 • Poetry • $15.95
UPNE • 1-800-421-1561 • www.upne.com
Four Way Books, PO Box 535, Village Station, New York, NY 10014, [email protected]
An excerpt from Longevity:
8.
Where it says I, it means me.
Where it says she, it means Margaret or Lucy or
my poor mother.
Where it says she, it means said.
The winner of the couplets contest was presented with a modern Edgefield pot created and contributed by contemporary Edgefield potter, Justin Guy. Each pot was inscribed with the winning poem, glazed and fired in Edgefield’s groundhog kiln, and presented to the winner at a second ceremony later in the spring, giving the festival, pottery and poetry another promotional opportunity.
Prize-winning poet Laurel Blossom'slatest book, a chapbook entitled Un-, has just been published (March, 2020) by Finishing Line Press.
Laurel’s second book-length narrative prose poem, Longevity, was published by Four Way Booksin October 2015.
The poem's style and structure seem so inevitable, it would be easy to overlook the audacity of the book's project, which is nothing less than to salvage our dead. Laurel Blossom's decision to make the world of the personal, and of the global, "literal" strikes me as poetic justice. Dr. Lanham holds an endowed chair as an Alumni Distinguished Professor and was named an Alumni Master Teacher in 2012.
Rather, the poems perceive our inheritances — of the body and of the planet — critically and graphically.
--- Jane Miller
Laurel Blossom's New and Selected Poems ...is a gift to anyone who reads and loves poetry. I love how this book renews one's faith in the possibilities of poetry, and in its power to delight with true innovation and luminous renewal.
--- Jason Shinder
As natural as speech or thinking, the poems in Degrees of Latitude consist mostly of single sentences, alone, like persons, and as alive.
She co-founded The Writers Community, for more than 20 years the esteemed writing residency and workshop program of the YMCA National Writer's Voice. Blossom begins her journey on an ice-breaker during the white nights of a polar north — cold as childhood — and then turns her gaze upon the uncharted regions of family history, secrecy and illusion, bravely and with uncommon self-knowledge, in deft and beautifully cadenced language that belies the arduousness of her task.
This work crosses, formally and insightfully, the traditional borders of confession and memoir, and moves into the unknown, mapping what is visible as well as what has, until now, been hidden. His research focuses on songbird ecology, as well as the African-American role in natural-resources conservation. Blossom's book-length poem Longevity achieves such translation: bordering the longed-for and the ill-gotten, a speaker sorts out her survivorship: a sister, a mother, a dear one.
Ecstatic!
--- Toi Derricotte
The Papers Said is enchanting.A number of the poems published in these journals have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
Laurel is a lifelong swimmer and, when not actually immersed in some body of water, swimming, she likes to be immersed in reading about it. They show Blossom's guts.
--- Northeast Rising Sun
POET LAUREATE OF EDGEFIELD:On Monday, March 2, 2015, the Town Council of Edgefield, South Carolina, voted to create the position of Poet Laureate of Edgefield, an honorary post lasting a renewable two years.
The charming ceremony included readings by the winners of the student Spring Into Poetry contest, held by District elementary, middle and high schools for the occasion. She edited a 20th anniversary anthology, Many Lights in Many Windows: Twenty Years of Great Fiction and Poetry from The Writers Communityin 1997. Read it and weep. Her interviews and essays on cultural and political topics, ranging from writers' colonies and amusement parks to art forgeries, libraries, and nuclear non-proliferation have appeared in Poets & Writers Magazine, Empire State Report, and things (UK), among others.
Laurel is Regent Emerita at Harris Manchester College, Oxford University, where she holds a lifetime Foundation Fellowship.
In its Spring, 2016 issue, Per Contrasays of Longevity: “Blossom's Longevityis a remarkable book, indisputable evidence that prose poetry, too, will make you ‘feel physically as if the top of [your] head were taken off.’ ”
Dreams are ways in which we can see what we sometimes don't want to see, where in some brief truce we might work out our human conditions.
This is...a deeply moving and skillful book written by a grown up American woman. In its Highlighting Fall Poetry 2015, Publishers Weeklylisted Longevityamong its poetry picks.