Description: Poetry. "By brave and honest recognition, coupled with a deft ability to glide between realms of perception tripped open by memory and emotion, Maxine Scates reconstructs a life undone by the brokenness of family, friends, and self. Nuanced, mysterious, intimate. Beautiful poems"--Dorianne Laux.
Brief description: Maxine Scates is the author of two previous collections of poetry, Black Loam (Cherry Grove, 2005) and Toluca Street (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989). She is co-editor, with David Trinidad, of HOLDING OUR OWN: THE SELECTED POETRY OF ANN STANFORD (Copper Canyon Press, 2001). She lives in Eugene, Oregon.
Review Quotes: "Undone is a serious and tender book of important poems in which Scates navigates the history of herself and her region in an effortless series of memories. She knows how to hold an image and examine it in a way that is a testament to her survival as a person and a poet. She also knows how to leave an image before it's been gutted, letting one part of a meaning lead toward and weave into another. These poems skirt on unconsciousness while remaining grounded in every important detail--every tractor, every dead relative, every drink taken or not taken. As such, she is able to paint on an extremely wide canvas, which is necessary because her subject matter is the vast concept of what makes us who we are and how we can only gain privy into who we are by starting everywhere at once--beginning, middle, and end--and unraveling everything we know and don't know until at last we stand in the truth of having been ... undone."--Michael Rosenbaum "Front Porch"