Foxglovewise
Poems
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- US$11.99
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- US$11.99
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Ange Mlinko, whose poetry is “irresistible” (Los Angeles Review of Books), opens our perception of other lives, or lives unlived.
Foxglovewise is, at its core, a response to the singular experience of the loss of one’s parents. It begins at an Eastern Orthodox Epiphany ritual in Florida and ends in a cemetery in Los Angeles. Yet, as with Ange Mlinko’s 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 it’s Europa borne over the waves, or gravestones bearing aliases rather than birth names, or books bequeathed to us by relatives in languages we can’t 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 in The Times Literary Supplement, “A reader could be merely dazzled by all this surface stylishness . . . but then they would miss the heart beneath it all.” Foxglovewise is a direct line to the author’s heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Mlinko's sonically rich latest (after Venice) draws on familial intimacy, loss, and the search for deeper understanding in poems that deal with the death of a mother and its generational impact: "my relatives/ changed their amphibrachic name to Bass." Mlinko is rarely less than dazzling thanks to the pleasure and rigor of her phrasing: "A seraglio of interior paramours"; "The lighthouse fruits like a bromeliad." These layered, allusive, and intelligent poems are various in their tones and colors, doing much to ensure that they keep "the ear at right angles to the eye" ("The Empire of Flora"). Many walk a line between wit and meditation ("the Unreal Conditional the tragic tense," or, as she writes elsewhere, "The coolness is applied to parts in pain"). There is a moving and unignorable sense of grief and loss beneath the surface, in an expertly managed balance with the luster of the vocabulary and music of these poems. Full of exquisitely observed internal and external landscapes ("I've been exiled to Paradise,/ it seems"), this is exemplary.
