Description: Blue Loop is composed of poems about addiction and recovery, using meditation as a lens through which memories of loss and harm might begin to be processed and accepted.
Brief description: CHELSEA DINGMAN's first book, Thaw (Georgia), was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series. Dingman is also the author of the chapbook What Bodies Have I Moved and has won the Southeast Review's Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize, the Water-stone Review's Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association's Creative Writing Award for Poetry. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.
Review Quotes: In this searing debut, language loops back and forth across chasm and current to both rescind and remake a present in collision with a future that it does not recognize in its constant approach. Braiding words across histories and memory and space and time, White pulls the present closer to examine the speaker's place within it, as well as the concrete details that make life events concerning addiction, recovery, and loss possible. In elegantly crafted poems that are both startling and arresting, White's collection deftly emulates the structural integrity of a star's blue loop, while mimicking its instability as it evolves. As such, Blue Loop makes space for transformation: through language, in a life, and in the reader. It asks one to enter the experiences of these poems and leave them not just changed but rearranged by all that has 'been abandoned / into this life' that is there yet not there, gone yet not gone. It is a graceful, surprising book that I will return to again and again.--Chelsea Dingman "author of Through a Small Ghost and Thaw"