Description:
Lost and Found Departments explores the intersections and tensions among many types of loss and, sometimes, recovery-of words, of people, of memories, of literary genres. Ranging from found poetry and monologues, to reimagined forms and poems of loss and recovery, Heather Dubrow's collection challenges readers to see beyond the surface of the everyday. With these witty, intelligent, and humane poems, Dubrow encourages us to see and discover the world around us as more than static or mechanistic. To her, the world is poetry.
Brief description: Heather Dubrow, John D. Boyd, SJ, Chair in Poetic Imagination at Fordham University, is the author of Forms and Hollows and two chapbooks. Among the journals where her poetry has appeared are Prairie Schooner, Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and The Yale Review.As literary critic, she has published seven single-authored volumes of literary criticism, a co-edited collection of essays, and an edition of Shakespeare's As You Like It.She was director of Fordham's Poets Out Loud reading series from Fall 2009 to Summer 2020.
Review Quotes:
Heather Dubrow's Lost and Found Departments is a dexterous and quite moving poetry
collection. It's an ode to poetic craft that, within its rich myriad of voices, structures, and
forms, revels in Dubrow's lexical puckishness, incisive sense of humor, and rather notable
ability to discover poetry everywhere and in every thing.
-Rowan Ricardo Phillips, National Book Award finalist
Dubrow's wit is both charming and disarming as she repurposes mechanical discourse
and braids it into a personal and poetic voice. The music in the everyday language, the
metaphors and leaps of association, the immediate address, the non-didactic moral
pondering, these qualities make one think of Marianne Moore or Kay Ryan. This is a
vigorous new poetry that gathers up the tatters of our modern verbal world and makes
them sing.
-Bonnie Costello, Boston University
Unabashed by the bawdy pun, the witty one-liner, the surprising punch line, Heather
Dubrow's wonderful Lost and Found Departments takes its place in the long-and serious,
but never solemn!-tradition of American humor. In these thematically wide-ranging
and formally nimble poems, Dubrow reveals her growing and deepening insight into the
mysteries of daily life.
-Ronald Wallace, University of Wisconsin-Madison
With her keen sense of language's capacity for pleasure and her puckish wordplay,
Dubrow's observances transform into renovations, each renewal made possible through
the very words she uses to record thought. In these pages, lost are the places and person
whose perils we grieve, the "back home in back there" never to be recovered; found is
Dubrow's wide, careful heart, made wider in the attempting.
-Kimberly Johnson, Brigham Young University
This terrific poet and critic does not exactly Have It All, because no one can have it all,
but she certainly has It, where It means whatever transfigures the earthly material of daily
life into the aerial architectures of real poems. She's playful, she's allusive like nobody's
business, she'll never "belittle the listener," and she, too, can "wink at the gremlins/who
slink between the lines."
-Stephanie Burt, Harvard University