Bad Hobby: Poems by Kathy Fagan

Bad Hobby: Poems

$15.99
Sale price  $15.99 Regular price 
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Bad Hobby: Poems by Kathy Fagan

Milkweed Editions

Bad Hobby: Poems

$15.99
Sale price  $15.99 Regular price 
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From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In 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 & breed" opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our "common griefs" so singular? Bad Hobby is 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 Bad Hobby thinks--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 & 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."
Book Details
Publisher:
Milkweed Editions
ISBN:
9781571315458
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
112
Authors:
Kathy Fagan
Published Date:
2022-09-13
Language:
English
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About Kathy Fagan

Kathy Fagan cofounded the MFA program in creative writing at The Ohio State University, where she is professor emerita of English. Her first collection, The Raft (Dutton, 1985), won the National Poetry Series, and MOVING & ST RAGE (University of North Texas Press, 1999) won the 1998 Vassar Miller Prize. Sycamore (Milkweed Editions, 2017) was a finalist for the 2018 Kingsley Tufts Award, and Bad Hobby (Milkweed, 2022) won the 2023 William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2023-24 and edited The Journal for over twenty years.

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