Northwestern University Press, 2021 Paper: 978-0-8101-4314-2 | eISBN: 978-0-8101-4315-9 Library of Congress Classification PS3608.A338B55 2021 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Blooming Fiascoes is a collective of verse that deconstructs identity. We are beautiful and monstrous. We live in a beautiful and monstrous world. Ellen Hagan poetically mirrors these metaphoric adversaries, drawing on her experiences as a woman, an artist, a mother, a transplanted southerner, and above all, a human being. She plumbs origins in history, body, and living to question how we reckon our whole selves in the catacombs of a world gone mad:
We mourn, we bless, / we blow, we wail, we / wind—down, we sip, / we spin, we blind, we / bend, bow & hem. We / hip, we blend, we bind, / we shake, we shine, / shine. We lips & we / teeth, we praise & protest.
In these poems, Assyrian, Italian, and Irish lines seep deeper into a body that is growing older but remains engaged with unruly encounters: the experience of raising daughters, sexual freedom, and squaring body image against the body’s prohibitions. This is a work where the legacy is still evolving and always asking questions in real time. Blooming Fiascos spindles poetry that is not afraid to see itself and the lives it inhabits.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
ELLEN HAGAN is the author of Hemisphere (TriQuarterly Books, 2015) and Crowned. A writer, performer, and educator, she is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry and has received grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her poems and essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Northwest and in the anthologies She Walks in Beauty,Southern Sin, and Women of Resistance. Hagan is the director of the poetry and theater departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. She coleads the Alice Hoffman Young Writers Retreat at Adelphi University. She lives with her partner and children in New York City.
REVIEWS
“In this courageous and jubilant collection, Ellen Hagan implores the reader to embrace what is messy and difficult in the world—to see the rough, awkward edges of our daily lives as the buds that eventually sprout into a ‘migratory swarm of praise.’ These poems are exuberant. They throw tantrums and chuckle. They yearn. They reminisce about broken mattresses and ‘a miracle of pigeons.’ They revere women with endearing odes to daughters, mothers, friends, colleagues, women who fall asleep in bakeries and on buses. Blooming Fiascoes is a feast of image and lyric that reminds us there is magic to be made of torn jeans, traffic jams, and a daughter’s missing tooth, that we must carry all these things with us and ‘hold it like a charm.’” —Vincent Toro, author of Tertulia
"In today’s difficult times the poems in Blooming Fiascoes are a salve for the soul. The book takes its reader on a magic journey filled with wonder and enchantment. The poems are generous and alive, the language precise and stunning." —Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, author of Arrival: Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2017)
“‘Her life a flare of yes.’ It takes much bravery and gumption to not choose the easy way. And to raise free girls, teaching them to also dare and discover. ‘Sometimes blood can be a blessing.’ Ellen Hagan gives us testimony, missive, lament and litany to light our travels through lyric love letters across generations and geography, singing odes even in desolate landscapes. ‘Such luck / to know love so well.’ Such luck to have this poet’s vision and exuberant portraits of experience in our hands.” —Kamilah Aisha Moon, author of Starshine & Clay
TABLE OF CONTENTS
To the hawk that circled J. Hood Park—
I am Not Dead, I’m Dormant
Your journey continues—
Search the Distance
Gates Open—
Once,
Itemization – Part I
Itemization – Part II
Nurse
To the dreams that made me search—
To Raise You, Daughter
Miriam
Self Portrait at 36 w/ David
To the period still arriving & marking the whole of me—
To 3:47am when your youngest throws up in her bed—
None of it for granted—
Picture This
Watching love—
Miriam Dawson Hagan
A braid of time—
High Proof
Same
To the breasts when it’s over—
What We Do—Now
As if overnight—
Tell me all the things you’d miss—
To the sleeping woman in Cindy's bakery on the corner of Saint Nicholas & 179th St.
Soaked Mourning
To the woman on St. Nicholas Avenue whose thigh was a wilderness blooming—
To the condom on 167th street sprawled between Findlay & College Avenue
To the woman falling to sleep beside me—
Express to Work
To the broken mattress on Park Avenue & 167th in the Bronx—
To the shark fin on the bullet train from Sendai to Tokyo—
Shelter
Meditative State | Safety
To Esmerely, at Claire’s who tells my daughters it won’t hurt—
Tell me all the things you'd miss
To bouquet & bloom—
Allow Me
The Meditation
Directions for that swim you know you want to take—
Rainey
To the rubber band holding my jeans together—
Tonight, ovulation reigns—
On hearing that a pussy smells like fish in middle school—
Carried Away
To both girls dipping bread in bowls of savory black beans in the Condesa—
Advice to myself after my mammogram & yearly doctor visit—
What Warms You Most
When My Father Calls
What I Will to Remember
Tonight—
Today You are Kite
“Lady in the streets, but a freak in the bed”
Roost
Museum of Sex
How We Make It Through
Each Day
For Miriam
I’m not dead, I’m dormant—
What to Do
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
Northwestern University Press, 2021 Paper: 978-0-8101-4314-2 eISBN: 978-0-8101-4315-9
Blooming Fiascoes is a collective of verse that deconstructs identity. We are beautiful and monstrous. We live in a beautiful and monstrous world. Ellen Hagan poetically mirrors these metaphoric adversaries, drawing on her experiences as a woman, an artist, a mother, a transplanted southerner, and above all, a human being. She plumbs origins in history, body, and living to question how we reckon our whole selves in the catacombs of a world gone mad:
We mourn, we bless, / we blow, we wail, we / wind—down, we sip, / we spin, we blind, we / bend, bow & hem. We / hip, we blend, we bind, / we shake, we shine, / shine. We lips & we / teeth, we praise & protest.
In these poems, Assyrian, Italian, and Irish lines seep deeper into a body that is growing older but remains engaged with unruly encounters: the experience of raising daughters, sexual freedom, and squaring body image against the body’s prohibitions. This is a work where the legacy is still evolving and always asking questions in real time. Blooming Fiascos spindles poetry that is not afraid to see itself and the lives it inhabits.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
ELLEN HAGAN is the author of Hemisphere (TriQuarterly Books, 2015) and Crowned. A writer, performer, and educator, she is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry and has received grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her poems and essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Northwest and in the anthologies She Walks in Beauty,Southern Sin, and Women of Resistance. Hagan is the director of the poetry and theater departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. She coleads the Alice Hoffman Young Writers Retreat at Adelphi University. She lives with her partner and children in New York City.
REVIEWS
“In this courageous and jubilant collection, Ellen Hagan implores the reader to embrace what is messy and difficult in the world—to see the rough, awkward edges of our daily lives as the buds that eventually sprout into a ‘migratory swarm of praise.’ These poems are exuberant. They throw tantrums and chuckle. They yearn. They reminisce about broken mattresses and ‘a miracle of pigeons.’ They revere women with endearing odes to daughters, mothers, friends, colleagues, women who fall asleep in bakeries and on buses. Blooming Fiascoes is a feast of image and lyric that reminds us there is magic to be made of torn jeans, traffic jams, and a daughter’s missing tooth, that we must carry all these things with us and ‘hold it like a charm.’” —Vincent Toro, author of Tertulia
"In today’s difficult times the poems in Blooming Fiascoes are a salve for the soul. The book takes its reader on a magic journey filled with wonder and enchantment. The poems are generous and alive, the language precise and stunning." —Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, author of Arrival: Poems (TriQuarterly Books/Northwestern University Press, 2017)
“‘Her life a flare of yes.’ It takes much bravery and gumption to not choose the easy way. And to raise free girls, teaching them to also dare and discover. ‘Sometimes blood can be a blessing.’ Ellen Hagan gives us testimony, missive, lament and litany to light our travels through lyric love letters across generations and geography, singing odes even in desolate landscapes. ‘Such luck / to know love so well.’ Such luck to have this poet’s vision and exuberant portraits of experience in our hands.” —Kamilah Aisha Moon, author of Starshine & Clay
TABLE OF CONTENTS
To the hawk that circled J. Hood Park—
I am Not Dead, I’m Dormant
Your journey continues—
Search the Distance
Gates Open—
Once,
Itemization – Part I
Itemization – Part II
Nurse
To the dreams that made me search—
To Raise You, Daughter
Miriam
Self Portrait at 36 w/ David
To the period still arriving & marking the whole of me—
To 3:47am when your youngest throws up in her bed—
None of it for granted—
Picture This
Watching love—
Miriam Dawson Hagan
A braid of time—
High Proof
Same
To the breasts when it’s over—
What We Do—Now
As if overnight—
Tell me all the things you’d miss—
To the sleeping woman in Cindy's bakery on the corner of Saint Nicholas & 179th St.
Soaked Mourning
To the woman on St. Nicholas Avenue whose thigh was a wilderness blooming—
To the condom on 167th street sprawled between Findlay & College Avenue
To the woman falling to sleep beside me—
Express to Work
To the broken mattress on Park Avenue & 167th in the Bronx—
To the shark fin on the bullet train from Sendai to Tokyo—
Shelter
Meditative State | Safety
To Esmerely, at Claire’s who tells my daughters it won’t hurt—
Tell me all the things you'd miss
To bouquet & bloom—
Allow Me
The Meditation
Directions for that swim you know you want to take—
Rainey
To the rubber band holding my jeans together—
Tonight, ovulation reigns—
On hearing that a pussy smells like fish in middle school—
Carried Away
To both girls dipping bread in bowls of savory black beans in the Condesa—
Advice to myself after my mammogram & yearly doctor visit—
What Warms You Most
When My Father Calls
What I Will to Remember
Tonight—
Today You are Kite
“Lady in the streets, but a freak in the bed”
Roost
Museum of Sex
How We Make It Through
Each Day
For Miriam
I’m not dead, I’m dormant—
What to Do
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE