Poetry. A collaborative text by two beloved poets, Cynthia Arrieu–King and the late Hillary Gravendyk, UNLIKELY CONDITIONS, "was written as a way to embellish and perpetuate a friendship." Of her process working with Gravendyk, Arrieu–King says: "We created this book through conversation about what remains important as we get older, jokes, inferences about existence, shared experience, separate experiences melded together, and a hilarious engagement with detail. We had a lot of fun together. This was the experience with all of Hillary's collaborators including her sister Megan Estrella, Maureen Alsop, Colleen Rosenfeld, Brenda Hillman, etc. I'm putting it out in the world because my friend and I had always talked about that as a given and also because I feel Hillary's family and other readers would want to see the beautiful work she did with me, and see a bit more of her intelligent heart and her love for life."

Unlikely Conditions

Literature & Fiction

Gravendyk, Hillary

Arrieu-King, Cynthia

Poetry

1913 Press

In Hillary Gravendyk’s The Soluble Hour, the speaker sings with visionary passion how the beloved and dear ones will soon be without her and laments for their imminent grief. But being in extremis pulls the voice towards testimony of unquestioned love, a recollection of landscapes Californian and otherwise, and previous selves. The poet wields her deep solitude as the measure of truth and conviction, the self that accepts its own impermanence.

The Soluble Hour

Omnidawn

Offering a new narrative of physical body constituted in perilous scenes of contact, Harm performs the loss of that fictive division between a unified body and its surrounding world. Terrifying and unlooked- for harmonies emerge in these poems, which dwell in a medicalized landscape where both the body and the land are monitored and laid bare. Troubling the idea of cure by recasting it in the terms of harm, Harm shifts between warning and error, nature and the body. In the sense of Baudelaire’s “correspondences,” bloodclots externalize into “sunclots” and the air is “rusty with blood.” The book troubles the idea of cure by casting it also as a form of harm itself. Moving amid the prose poem and the lyric, Harm navigates a landscape of extremity both frightening and filled with wonders.

Harm

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

Books by Gravendyk, Hillary

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

Unlikely Conditions

The Soluble Hour

Harm