Suspensions

Literature & Fiction

Ehret, Terry

Poetry

White Mountain Press

Poetry. "Terry Ehret contructs poems that are fearless...No matter how dark her themes, she manages to circle back...to reclaim new and widening patterns of light, as dark hair, antlers, corollas of oaks spring from her canvas. It is how she listens to her subjects and finds their form that ultimately stuns the readers. Like Joaquin Miller in "The Heights," she grips the world so hard she hold it in place for a few moments -- and makes it shine" Fran Ringold, Editor of Nimrod. Terry Ehret's LOST BODY is also available from SPD.

TRANSLATIONS FROM THE HUMAN LANGUAGE

Sixteen Rivers Press

Poetry. Terry Ehret's third collection, LUCKY BREAK, responds to our fractured times with a lyrical blend of levity and gravity, whimsy and horror, like the sculpture that inspired the title poem. From the opening musings on the origins of writing, to the sequence of poems based on the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space, to the final lyrics set against the war in Iraq, Ehret reminds us that every catastrophe also opens us to possibilities: new ways of imagining and perceiving our own history, landscape, language, time, and relationships. Here are poems, crafted with intelligence and vision, that speak to this moment, living as we are in a world "at the edge of all our changes." Terry Ehret is one of the founders of Sixteen Rivers Press. Literary awards for her previous collections include the National Poetry Series, the Commonwealth Club of California Book Award, and the Nimrod/ Hardman Pablo Neruda Poetry Prize. She has taught writing at San Francisco State and Sonoma State Universities, California College of the Arts, Santa Rosa Junior College, and with the California Poets in the Schools Program. She currently leads private workshops in Sonoma County, California, where she lives with her family.

LUCKY BREAK

Humor & Satire

Poetry. Selected for publication in the National Poetry Series by Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Carolyn Kizer, Terry Ehret's first book explores her sense of estrangement from needs and desires, and often from her own body as she struggles for identity and definition and the continual recreation of self in intimacy, in motherhood, and in language. She comes into language as if wading into a foreign elements, walking "the boundary between the dead and the silence of her ordinary life," taking the reader into myth, memory, dream, sexual desire, and in the final section, through an imaginative interpretation of an ancient hieroglyph text. If H.D. had been a language poet, she might have written something like this.

Lost Body (National Poetry Series)

Copper Canyon Press

Night Sky Journey begins with an invocation to the voices of creation, lodged inside ancient carved stones, and ends with a sequence of sonnets inspired by Colorado's San Juan Mountains. Framed by these landscapes, the poems move through many worlds: real, remembered, and imagined. In the garden, the dead step easily into the autumn air, a brass doorknob in Paris opens to a parallel world, the letters of the alphabet turn back into cryptic images, and the Time Lady goes on "shaving the edge off eternity in ten second increments." And yet, these poems are very much of this world, rich in memory and sensual pleasures, rooted in personal history and the vastness of geological time.

Night Sky Journey

Kelly's Cove Press