{"title":"Poetry by Kathy Fagan","description":"","products":[{"product_id":"the-unbecoming-poems-kathy-fagan","title":"The Unbecoming: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003eOn a sketch of the Virgin and Child, Michelangelo instructed his young assistant, in shorthand Italian, to \u003cem\u003eDraw faster\u003c\/em\u003e, acknowledging that life lasts a moment, death--and art--far longer. As an aging, bi, childless poet currently recognizing the limits of her own life and that of our planet, Kathy Fagan has immersed herself in the intimate and urgent discovery that growth and decay are the same cycle, and that art and memory, made in the tumultuous rush of these, are the deeply human attempts to outlast them.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFagan's luminous seventh collection, \u003cem\u003eThe Unbecoming\u003c\/em\u003e, begins with the sequence \"Listening to Others,\" and a command, \u003cem\u003eRun\u003c\/em\u003e, into a process that is, for all of us, a circle of becoming and unbecoming simultaneously. Favoring perspective over nostalgia and clarity over certainty, the poems are, then, memento mori, a loving reminder, a poet's reckoning with the rewards and losses of age, and with our painfully beautiful little lives \"rounded with a sleep.\"\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Kathy Fagan","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44300723912746,"sku":"9781324131397","price":26.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/the-unbecoming-poems-poems-by-kathy-fagan-hardcover-2448199.jpg?v=1777512490"},{"product_id":"bad-hobby-poems-kathy-fagan-paperback","title":"Bad Hobby: Poems","description":"\u003cb\u003eFrom Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes \u003ci\u003eBad Hobby\u003c\/i\u003e, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003c\/b\u003eIn a working-class family that considers sensitivity a \"fatal diagnosis,\" how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body \"meant to bend \u0026amp; breed\" opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our \"common griefs\" so singular? \u003ci\u003eBad Hobby \u003c\/i\u003eis a hard-earned meditation on questions like these-a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a \"child who won't ever get born\" with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. \"You think your one life precious--\"And \u003ci\u003eBad Hobby \u003c\/i\u003ethinks--hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces \"inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to \/ shatter the glass of our locked cars \u0026amp; save us.\" And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. \"Don't worry, baby,\" Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. \"We're okay.\"","brand":"Kathy Fagan","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44300730499114,"sku":"9781571315458","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/bad-hobby-poems-poems-by-kathy-fagan-paperback-8195206.jpg?v=1777512487"},{"product_id":"sycamore-poems-kathy-fagan-paperback","title":"Sycamore: Poems","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cstrong\u003eFINALIST FOR THE KINGSLEY TUFTS AWARD\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eMeditative and richly written, this collection of poems by Kathy Fagan takes the sycamore as its inspiration--and delivers precise, luminous insights on lost love, nature, and the process of recovery.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\"It is the season of separation \u0026amp; falling \/ Away,\" Fagan writes. And so--like the abundance of summer diminishing to winter, and like the bark of the sycamore, which sheds to allow the tree's expansion--the speaker of these poems documents a painful loss and tenuous rebirth, which take shape against a forested landscape. Black walnuts fall where no one can eat or smell them. Cottonwood sends out feverish signals of pollen. And everywhere are sycamores, informed by Fagan's scientific and mythological research--shedding, growing tall, pale, and hollow enough to accommodate a person. Fluidly metaphorical; filled with references to film, sculpture, and architecture; and linguistically playful--\"Word games reveal a lot,\" says Fagan's speaker--these poems unflinchingly lay bare both the poetic process and an emotional one.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSpellbinding and ambitious--finding catharsis in wordplay and the humanity in nature--\u003cem\u003eSycamore\u003c\/em\u003e is an important new work from a writer whose poems \"gleam like pearls or slowly burning stones\" (Philip Levine). \u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Milkweed Editions","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44300730564650,"sku":"9781571314734","price":15.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0690\/0891\/6522\/files\/sycamore-poems-poems-by-kathy-fagan-paperback-9238050.jpg?v=1777512487"}],"url":"https:\/\/thepoetryshop.com\/collections\/poetry-by-kathy-fagan.oembed","provider":"The Poetry Shop LLC","version":"1.0","type":"link"}