Rare High Meadow Of Which I Might Dream

The Bird is Her Reason There are some bodies that emerge into desire as a god rises from the sea, emotion and memory hang like dripping clothes—this want is like entering that heated red on the mouth of a Delacroix lion, stalwart, always that red which makes my teeth ache and my skin feel a hand that has never touched me, the tree groaning outside becomes a man who knocks on my bedroom window, edge of red on gold fur, the horse, the wild flip of its head, the rake of claws across its back, the unfocussed, swallowed eye. Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream is a book haunted by the afterlife of medieval theology and literature yet grounded in distinctly modern quandaries of desire. Connie Voisine’s female speakers reverberate with notes of Marie de France’s tragic heroines, but whereas Marie’s poems are places where women’s longings quickly bloom and die in captivity—in towers and dungeons—Voisine uses narrative to suspend the movement of storytelling. For Voisine, poems are occasions for philosophical wanderings, extended lyrics that revolve around the binding and unbinding of desire, with lonely speakers struggling with the impetus of wanting as well as the necessity of a love affair’s end. With fluency, intelligence, and deeply felt emotional acuity, Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream navigates the heady intersection of obsessive love and searing loss. Praise for Cathedral of the North “Voisine’s poetry is wholly unsentimental, tactile, and filled with unexpected beauty. She is political in the best sense. . . . A dazzling, brave, and surprising first book.”—Denise Duhamel, Ploughshares

The Aquamarine Issue is the fifth anniversary issue of Fairy Tale Review, and is appropriately its most oceanic, its most aesthetically diverse, issue to date. Despite this diversity the fairy tale pulse or “feel” is present in each piece in The Aquamarine Issue. What also contains this issue and holds it within the salt palace of tiny sea horses is how the narratives and poems, taken together in here, can be seen to contribute not only to the very important living body of contemporary fairy tales—so nascent and now—but also to the conversation about what constitutes “a fairy tale,” that monumental type of art.

Connie Voisine's third book of poems, Calle Florista, centers on the border between the US and Mexico and celebrates the stunning, if severe, desert landscape. Southern New Mexico's proximity to Mexico (indeed, it wasstill a part of Mexico until 167 years ago) is also an occasion for Voisine to explore themes of splitting and friction in both human and political contexts. Through a combination of directness and excision, the poems in this book oscillate between describing complex, private sensibilities, on the one hand, and, on the other, cracking the private self open (and vulnerable) to the wider world. The focus on the Mexico-US border is also a way for Voisine to experiment with the speaking voice in the poems: whose space is this border, she asks, and what voice can properly tell the story of this place?

Macy and Danny, two teenage boy who have both grown up under difficult circumstances, turn out very differently--one becomes a hero, the other a murderer.

Poetry. Connie Voisine's newest chapbook follows the observations and consolations of a speaker undergoing loss and motherhood in a contemporary, very problematic America. Honesty and humor unite to create an impressive resistance to the threatening forces of crime, alcoholism, poverty, and misogyny. Acknowledging without accepting a world that expects women to exist quietly and complacently, she meets each of its challenges with an approach that is realist without being pessimistic. By exercising her acerbic language and even sharper wit, she resolutely defends her power from a society hell-bent on taking it away.