Description: Svoboda writes of a world in which the reassuring simplicity remembered from childhood is difficult to recover. Outside of this vision of the past, all present life seems an aberration--an existence where violence can supplant love, families break apart, a child dies.
Brief description: TERESE SVOBODA is the author of ten books of prose and poetry, most recently Black Glasses Like Clark Kent which won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her honors in poetry include the Iowa Poetry Prize and two prizes from the Poetry Society of America, the Lucille Medwick Award and Cecil Hemley Award. Her opera WET premiered at Walt Disney's REDCAT performance space in Los Angeles in 2005. Svoboda lives in New York.
Review Quotes:
Svoboda exhibits a remarkable range and command of her subject matter: love, friendship and motherhood, set variously on the prairie and in Africa and the South Pacific. . . . If the most touching of her verses are those dedicated to a son who died in early childhood, the most appealing and original in imagery are Svoboda's erotic poems. At the center of her work is a desire not just to write about love, but to redefine it and expand its possibilities. This poet creates moments that are stronger than everyday experience, moments that are, as she suggests, all aberration, and all the more true and real for being so.
--Publishers Weekly