Flying Out With the Wounded
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- $26.99
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- $26.99
Publisher Description
This collection of poems is striking in its powerful representation of humanity and its dramatic use of language. Anne Caston explores the inner recesses of the human mind and body, delving into the murky shadows where individuals fear to tread. The poems consider the nature of death, love, brutality, friendship, and much more. Caston plays with different points of view and keeps readers on their toes. The physicality of these moving and disturbing poems is sure to captivate lovers of poetry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Many of the poems in Caston's first collection, winner of the 1996 New York University Prize for poetry, take place in the emergency room, the burn ward or the morgue as bodies are examined, opened or catalogued. Hers is the territory between the injured and the healed. "I couldn't tell clearly where the wound ended/ and the body began," she writes in "Anatomy." And so it is with a surgeon's precision that Caston opens up a world of blood and stainless steel, of bodies and instruments, taking a reader on a tour of those working hours when most of us are asleep: the graveyard shift. Compassionate, but veering away from sentiment, she examines the horrors in this night world and offers up her own brand of intensive care. "We move/ between the living and the dying,/ heavy footed, pocked with grief." Other poems involve refugees, abused women, cancer victims, the siege of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Tex., and the poor. Occasionally, Caston settles merely for dressing up mundane ideas in poetic affect, but when she compresses an anecdote into verse, her poetry is as sharp and bright--and sometimes as revealing--as a scalpel.
