BAD GIRL WITH HAWK: Poems

Literature & Fiction

Van Winckel, Nance

Poetry

University of Illinois Press

Nance Van Winckel's wry, provocative slant on the world and her command of images and ideas enliven these stunning poems. Presented in two parts, Pacific Walkers first gives imagined voice to anonymous dead individuals, entries in the John Doe network of the Spokane County Medical Examiner's Records. The focus then shifts to named but now-forgotten individuals in a discarded early-1900s photo album purchased in a secondhand store. We encounter figures devoid of history but enduring among us as lockered remains, and figures who come with histories―first names and dates, and faces preserved in photographs―but who no longer belong to anyone. Watch the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2GtPW3STVX0&amp;list=UUge4MONgLFncQ1w1C_BnHcw&amp;index=10&amp;feature=plcp

Pacific Walkers: Poems (Pacific Northwest Poetry Series)

University of Washington Press

Quake \kwþk\ vi quaked; quak-ing: to shake or vibrate usually from shock or instability.Unforeseen and unavoidable shocks not only alter our lives but send tremors into the futures of many others. In this intriguing collection of five individual yet interconnected stories, Nance Van Winckel chronicles the ripple effects that one life or action can have on the lives of many seemingly unrelated people.Held together by a wealth of images, items, and ideals, these tantalizing tales join Sara, Fritz, Maria, Stevie, Nona, Claudia, and Sam as one. An earthquake appears in each story, reminding us that beneath the surface, all is tumult, molten, flux. And while each quake sings of life's unpredictability and precariousness, it is joined by familiar imagesþplayer pianos, brass doorknobs, and movie postersþwhich fall away, often to return, altered.The role of Gypsies, apparently inconsequential at first, grows to become a unifying voice. When Sara loses her hands after a freak accident in "Ever After," she encounters two Gypsy sisters whose scandalous family affairs permeate the rest of the book. In "Hearsay," Fritz, an out-of-work ventriloquist, is haunted by a failed love affair with a Gypsy woman thirty-four years past, and the son he never knew. In the final story of the collection, "Taking Leave," the artist Sam leaves his old life behind to start over again, while his wife seeks solace among a group of intriguing women who help her begin anew.A tapestry of interwoven destinies, of loves lost and lives rediscovered, Quake will pull the reader deep into the intensity of Van Winckel's fictive world.

Quake: Stories (Volume 1)

United States

University of Missouri

"There is so much unpredictability and surprise in Nance Van Winckel's poems that they seem to hover, sometimes tremble, slightly ahead of the reader and writer, yet all the while rewarding anyone who cares to follow."―Li-Young Lee, author of Behind My Eyes: Poems\nVan Winckel's poems hover at the intersections of folktale and history, of past life regressions and future life visions, in a voice that is intimate, eerie, wry, and always strangely like a voice that has been going on in our heads without our noticing. The chill and pleasure it renders is a little like what one feels upon first reading Proust.

The Many Beds of Martha Washington

Lynx House Press

A measure of heaven

Pereira, Peter

Floating Bridge Press

Sister Zero: A Memoir

In Sister Zero, a woman who never wanted children suddenly becomes a mother to her nine-year-old nephew after her sister commits suicide at age 34. Fifteen years later, the boy will also kill himself and in almost exactly the same manner.\nSister Zero is narrated through short prose sections and snippets of "advice" from Mister Ed (of the old television show), while Nance Van Winckel exhumes the sisters' shared childhood for missed clues, interrogates memory's accuracy, and interacts with a mother who's disappearing into late-stage Alzheimer's.\nAs the shock of these deaths ripples out, the book progresses in swift strokes between the tough and tender, often staring stony-eyed at a terrifying moment, then jumping forward or backward in time to a moment of quiet humor.\nEach chapter begins with an altered page from the Official Guide to the 1964 World's Fair: collages Van Winckel made as testaments to that touchstone event in New York when the sisters were children, a time she realized how huge the world was, how vastly different other countries and cultures were from her own. The Fair was all about the future, its bright and happy promises. She and her now-dead sister rode a ride called "tunnel to the future." The sister was scared; our narrator was not.

Biographies & Memoirs

Community & Culture

Slant Books

In Sister Zero, a woman who never wanted children suddenly becomes a mother to her nine-year-old nephew after her sister commits suicide at age 34. Fifteen years later, the boy will also kill himself and in almost exactly the same manner. Sister Zero is narrated through short prose sections and snippets of "advice" from Mister Ed (of the old television show), while Nance Van Winckel exhumes the sisters' shared childhood for missed clues, interrogates memory's accuracy, and interacts with a mother who's disappearing into late-stage Alzheimer's. As the shock of these deaths ripples out, the book progresses in swift strokes between the tough and tender, often staring stony-eyed at a terrifying moment, then jumping forward or backward in time to a moment of quiet humor. Each chapter begins with an altered page from the Official Guide to the 1964 World's Fair: collages Van Winckel made as testaments to that touchstone event in New York when the sisters were children, a time she realized how huge the world was, how vastly different other countries and cultures were from her own. The Fair was all about the future, its bright and happy promises. She and her now-dead sister rode a ride called "tunnel to the future." The sister was scared; our narrator was not.

The Dirt: Poems (Miami University Press Poetry)

Miami Univ Pr

When the dirt is good, a small thing burrows and twists, and enlarges. Gossip becomes folktale, rumor becomes fable, narrators turn informants. There is dirt under the nails of those who speak in these poems. Common dirt, communal dirt. The dirt that lays us all low, and which receives us finally with its blessing of rot, commingling us in a slow dissolve.

The Dirt: Poems (Miami University Press Poetry Series)

After a Spell (Miami University Press Poetry Series)

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Books by Van Winckel, Nance