Forms of Conversion

Literature & Fiction

Funk, Allison

Poetry

Alice James Books

Poetry. "In THE TUMBLING BOX, Allison Funk offers us an exquisite accomplishment: elegant, subtle poems that confront the painful and complex enormity we call love, in particular, parental love. In spite of the best of intentions, in giving birth, we give birth not only to love but to suffering; born, we are borne not only toward love but toward suffering. Rigorously and scrupulously crafted, these lyrics move us with their hard-won wisdom, awe us with their persistent lucidity, and redeem us with their enduring grace"--Eric Pankey.

The Tumbling Box

C&R Press

Includes such pieces as "Insomnia," "Backstroke," "Turning forty," " After dark," and "Faultline"

Living At The Epicenter (Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize)

Northeastern University Press

FREE VERSE EDITIONS, edited by JON THOMPSON | "The poems in Wonder Rooms, this powerful, heart-breaking, elegantly composed collection, are like the cabinets within such a room. Each is its own intimate interior space, where a reader is invited into the unknown. Some of these poetic spaces hold natural histories-crickets, dangerously beautiful corals, Provençal snails. Others open to the terrors of love and motherhood, still others to the chaotic orders of the bestiary. This is an amazingly gorgeous and intelligent book-a wonder, a pleasure, and an invitation to inward voyage." -JENNIFER ATKINSON | "In Wonder Rooms, her most intimate collection of poems, Allison Funk explores the intersection between the seen and the unseen. This territory of in-between is both fragile and terrifying. Nevertheless, she remains there, using 'language as a lens to see through.' Such seeing can be harrowing, but the poems, no matter what they light upon, are stunning in all senses of the word. -ANDREA HOLLANDER | "In Wonder Rooms, Allison Funk gives us poems of uncompromising lyricism, many of which narrate obliquely the traumas of an adult son's mental illness. This volatile material is contained in poems linked by images of 'rooms,' as if the poet wants to contain the violence of his illness within the strictures of architecture. The wonder room becomes a metaphor for the strangeness of mental disorder and of existence itself. The book is a contemporary Stabat Mater. It bears much the same stark power as Michelangelo's Rondanini Pietà, in which the two unfinished bodies seem to grow out of each other, are so intimate, yet finally so apart. -DONALD PLATT | ALLISON FUNK is the author of four previous books of poems, including, most recently, The Tumbling Box. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, she is a Distinguished Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

Wonder Rooms (Free Verse Editions)

Parlor Press

In The Visible Woman, Allison Funk writes of how women often disappear into the roles expected of them, becoming invisible to themselves. To fill in "the thin / chalk outline" of herself that she's "drawn and erased" for as long as she can remember, Funk returns to the anatomical model of "The Visible Woman" she left unassembled as a child. With poems rather than the kit's plastic organs and bones, she strives to "create a likeness / to embody herself." In her efforts at self-representation, the poet is guided by the visual artist Louise Bourgeois- her real-life model of a woman who proved that art gives us a way of recognizing ourselves. In The Visible Woman, "with the care of a surgeon closing a wound," Allison Funk stitches together the scars of memory, loss, and grief, reclaiming a voice and visibility against a patriarchal erasure of women. In the care of her deft hands and uncompromising vision, I find myself not stunned into silence, but startled into the desire to advocate, to speak. -Jenny Molberg In the beautifully crafted, urgent poems of The Visible Woman, Allison Funk probes the layers of the conflicted self: the artist in relation to her body. Hers "is a story of how we disappear," but like the black hole she is drawn to, which emits the "oldest, longest, lowest note in the universe," the poet sings herself into sight. -Cleopatra Mathis The exquisite poems in Allison Funk's latest collection address the burdens and blessings of a woman's flesh. In it, her attention moves from a child's discomfort with a plastic Visible Woman to the brave self-exposure of a woman artist painting her own nudity. This is a collection to return to on our own body's journey from the womb to the necessary relinquishing of the visible. -Marjorie Stelmach Like her brilliant mentor and muse Louise Bourgeois- whose "Cells" series of installations might almost be a palimpsest for The Visible Woman- Allison Funk brings to each poem/cell a superlative physical awareness; but whatever she writes also brims, as for Bourgeois, with psychic content that, however subtly presented, is more than merely arresting. Funk operates on an existential knife-edge, and, the reader is privileged to behold "...the writer/ nearly done for, creating a likeness/ to embody herself."-Sydney Lea Allison Funk is the author of five previous books of poems, including Wonder Rooms, from Free Verse Editions of Parlor Press. The recipient of a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, and the Society of Midland Authors Poetry Prize, she is a Professor Emerita at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.

The Visible Woman

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

"Allison Funk in a single poem moves within very few words from a line that is dew-like, made with the lightest of touches, almost transparent -- to oceanic power. This counterpoint contained within her chosen forms gives her work a beauty that should last, with good reason, longer than nuclear shields, gas masks, and other fashions." --Stanley Moss "Allison Funk's The Knot Garden is an extraordinary book. It deserves (and will soon find) readers as lucky as I have been to enjoy its luscious aches and perfect lovely sadnesses. Plainly, if she continues to write like this, to make the kind of leap this new book represents, Allison Funk will prove herself to be what some of us have figured her for already --a major American poet." --Robert Wrigley

The Knot Garden: Poems

Sheep Meadow Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Funk, Allison. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Funk, Allison

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Funk, Allison. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Forms of Conversion

Forms of Conversion

The Tumbling Box

Living At The Epicenter (Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize)

Wonder Rooms (Free Verse Editions)

The Visible Woman

The Knot Garden: Poems