While helping plow, a young girl on the Iowa prairie finds a porcelain doll that becomes her best friend and, eventually, a family legacy passed down through generations.

Plowie: A Story from the Prairie

Kirkpatrick, Patricia

Children's Books

Harcourt Childrens Books

“I find myself taken by Patricia Kirkpatrick’s unsentimental tenderness—a mark, I believe, of all good lyric poetry.”—Jane HirshfieldThe poems in Century’s Road travel the “plain public road” of American daily life while glimpsing the humanity of other continents. At the center of the book is the figure of the child as witness, whether newborn or newly immigrated, abandoned or unplanned, learning to read, or telling stories. In a voice combining a clear sense of image and sound, these poems stand in a lyric tradition yet address issues—and mysteries—beyond the personal. The poet pursues the life of the imagination and subjects of birth and death; the natural world; family, community and womanhood; and sometimes touching the legacy of World War II, Vietnam and September 11th.from Century’s Road:In the middle of the century, I stood watchingflickering reels of people flee the burning city.A child stood sobbing at the edge of the road, holding her arms out butnobody stopped to take her. Nobody stopped. Thundering passagethundering past. The black and white footage of war. The hard cart of migration over stone.Patricia Kirkpatrick grew up in Des Moines and graduated from the University of Iowa and San Francisco State University. She has received awards from the NEA, the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Loft-McKnight and the Jerome Foundation. Her poems have appeared in magazines such as The Antioch Review, Threepenny Review and Luna. Her essays and interviews with American poets have been published in Ruminator/Hungry Mind Review, Speakeasy and Riverbank Review. She teaches in the MFA program at Hamline University, and has also taught and conducted workshops at Macalester College, the Princeton Theological Seminary and the Loft. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her family.

Century's Road: Poems

Literature & Fiction

United States

Holy Cow! Press

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick’s Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the emotional core of the self,” and central to the process of memory. In poems endowed with this emotional charge but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick sets out to recreate what was lost by fashioning a dreamlike reality. Odessa, roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once real and imagined, resembles simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a mythical god-inhabited city. In image-packed lines bearing shades of Classical heroism, Kirkpatrick delivers a personal narrative of stunning dimension.

Odessa: Poems (Lindquist & Vennum Prize for Poetry)

Genre Fiction

MILKWEED EDITIONS *

"Why would I expect to feel blameless?" Troubled and meditative,Blood Moon is an examination of racism, whiteness, and language within one woman's life. In these poems, words are deeply powerful, even if--with the onset of physical infirmity--they sometimes become unfixed and inaccessible, bringing together moral and mortal peril as Patricia Kirkpatrick's speaker ages. From a child, vulnerable to "words / we learned / outside and in school, / at home, on television": "Some words you don't say / but you know." To a citizen, reckoning with contemporary police brutality: "Some days need a subject an an action / or a state of being because it's grammar. /The cop shot. The man was dead." And to a patient recovering from brain surgery: "I don't have names. / Words are not with me." Throughout the collection, the moon plays companion to this speaker, as it moves through its own phases, disappearing behind one poem before appearing fully in the next. In Kirkpatrick's hands, the moon is confessor, guide, muse, mirror, and--most of all--witness, to the cruelty that humans inflict upon one another. "The moon," she reminds us, "will be there." Compassionate, contemplative, occasionally wonderstruck,Blood Moon is a moving work of moral introspection.

Blood Moon

Poetry

Examines the life and accomplishments of the African American writer, performer, and teacher and includes a selection of her poetry.

Maya Angelou: Voices in Poetry (Voices of Poetry)

Biographies

Creative Education

Examines the life of the English poet and presents some of his poems, including "Ode to a Nightingale" and "To Autumn."

John Keats: Voices in Poetry

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