Madelon Sprengnether is Regents Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, where she teaches in the MFA Program. She is the author of two memoirs, Rivers, Stories, Houses, Dreams, and Crying at the Movies; two collections of poetry, The Normal Heart, and The Angel of Duluth; a co-edited collection of women's travel writing, The House on Via Gombito; and numerous other works of feminist literary and psychoanalytic scholarship. The Normal Heart was a Minnesota Voices winner, and Crying at the Movies was a Minnesota Book Award finalist. In addition, she has received awards from the Bush Foundation, The Loft, and the National Endowment for the Arts. Her memoir Great River Road: Memoir and Memory is forthcoming from New Rivers Press. For more information see her website: www.madelonsprengnether.com.
"Madelon Sprengnether's short prose poems surprise us with their
quick turns and telegraphic insights, their physical bearing--what
she calls "bodyworlds"--and spiritual poise. Near Solstice is a
book of urgencies."--Edward Hirsch "'If I only knew where we were
going. I'd know how to end.' writes Madelon Sprengnether in her
brilliant new book of prose poems, Near Solstice. Perhaps that is
true, but it makes us the luckiest of readers that she doesn't
know; that we are allowed to come along for this journey that is at
moments harrowing, at moments joyful. A journey that is always
approached in the spirit of an imaginative investigation that
leaves the reader continually wanting more. What a deep pleasure
this book is!"--Jim Moore, author of Underground: New and Selected
Poems "'I can't stop seeing, ' one narrator proclaims in Madelon
Sprengnether's delicious new collection. And doesn't that make us
all lucky? In Near Solstice, Sprengnether maps the liminal--the
ineffable gray spaces between dawn and full sunlight, between dusk
and utter darkness, between health and illness, the body "becoming
ever more itself over time." Like Eurydice, Sprengnether travels
through dark underworlds in these searching and meditative poems.
'How physical this story, ' she writes. We are all 'layers of
cells--in an unstable order.' In these poems, Sprengnether invites
us into fuller habitation of the body, to notice the gold sky, to
hear the urgent call of birds, to feel the proximity of death in
order to be more fully alive. Do you feel the 'tongues of ravening
dogs at your feet'? This book is a balm, a guide, a hedge, and a
companion against the vagaries of mortality."--Debra Marquart,
author of The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of
Nowhere "A fierce question propels the poems in Madelon
Sprengnether's new book: 'So tell me. What on earth God wants from
us?' Is it love, beauty, pleasure, duty? As Sprengnether explores
that question, alert to life routines, rituals, sacrifices, even
pilgrimages--driving, swimming, caring for an aging parent,
exploring landscapes and ancient mythologies--her poems reveal
striking layers of desire, grief, and tenderness."--Patricia
Kirkpatrick, author of Odessa
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