BkMk Press, 2021 Paper: 978-1-943491-30-8 | eISBN: 978-1-943491-35-3 Library of Congress Classification PS3613.I6573F58 2021 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC
ABOUT THIS BOOK This book, which was selected by poet John Hodgen for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, ranges across rural Florida and Georgia as well as Los Angeles and New York City, include considerations of homesickness, memory, music, alcohol, love, and loss. With a voice at once inquisitive and prescient, Minor meditates on consumption, vice, homesickness, memory, family, and the landscape. Minor’s writing is unerringly lyric and blooming with elegant charm and keen description. This book is an alchemy of fortitude in the face of despair and all the transformative possibility that comes with the hope for a better future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Laura Minor won the Rita Dove Poetry Award (chosen by Marilyn Nelson), the Sassaman Graduate Creative Writing Award, the International Literary Award, and the Emerging Writers Spotlight Award, chosen by poet D.A. Powell. She was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She was named one of the "10 Acclaimed FSU English Professors That Will Inspire You" by collegemagazine.com. Her poetry is forthcoming or has most recently appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, The Missouri Review, The Normal School, South Carolina Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, and the 2021 New Rivers Press anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic In Contemporary Poetry and Prose. She was a Teachers College Fellow at Columbia University and was chosen by Denise Duhamel for a Sarah Lawrence Poetry Award. She holds a PhD from Florida State University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. She currently lives near the Appalachian Trail.
REVIEWS
"This is the magnificent story of ruining things, weeping bottles, flying tuna-fish sandwiches," writes Minor in her panoramic debut that explores setting (mostly Florida), relationships with men and women, illness, friendship, depression, and suicidal ideation. Its dedication "to women everywhere who refuse to give up their dreams" signals the collection’s interest in resilience. Readers will enjoy Minor’s fierce, unabashed voice.”
—Publishers Weekly
“One of the greatest pleasures I take in poetry is that feeling of camaraderie: the shared space of mutual humanity. That sense of belonging in the world, even with all its volatilities and uncertainties. And Laura Minor’s poems deliver on that pleasure. Achingly real and ever aspiring, this book is full of wonder, full of longing and its rewards. ‘I guess I just wanted to see snow falliing from the sky,’ she writes and ‘I will open a small sea for you.’ I find these poems so gratifying, so necessary. Tender and awake to what’s possible.”
—D.A. Powell author of Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys
"There had been Empire. There had been metamorphosis. Now, after that love and that music and that dream of Rome, the poet must come to terms with being human, must accept being one thing instead of many, exiled by Time back to the finality of the body. This is Flowers as Mind Control. Like her co-pilot, the Ovid of the Black Sea Letters, Laura Minor comes off like a fallen god, stranded on barbarian ramparts, piecing together the new real."
—Josh Bell, author of Alamo Theory
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Foreword by John Hodgen
Isolation Prayer
Primal
The Ricketiest Song in the World
Exiled in Palatka
Aubade
You’ve Got the Whole House Fighting
Real Town & Country
Fall Invitation
Prayer for the Water to Hold Us
For Every Jesus, a Woman
Drinking to Excess After Much Has Gone Wrong
Ode Calling Out John Hughes, Director
Lungfish
Unburden
Because We Will Not Always Be
Edward Leedskalnin, 1887-1951, Raised the Coral Castle
To Be Alone Is a Gift
Open Window on State St.
In the Lilacs
I Don’t Camp Well
With Guitar in Hand
A Fairly Serious Relationship
Recidivism
What Was Here, If Not Angels
Winged
Leaving Baby Island
The Lost Body a Music Makes
The Murder Hole, Brooklyn, NY 2011
Aqua Queen
Elegy for Marina without the War and Famine
Home State
Flowers as Mind Control
New Girl at the Seed Factory
Pocket Change
Reunion
For Want of You
Nine-Dollar Bacon
In Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, the Eponymous Female Lead Survives
In Fractals of Matter on Earth Where Heaven Is a Metaphor for Heaven
This book, which was selected by poet John Hodgen for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, ranges across rural Florida and Georgia as well as Los Angeles and New York City, include considerations of homesickness, memory, music, alcohol, love, and loss. With a voice at once inquisitive and prescient, Minor meditates on consumption, vice, homesickness, memory, family, and the landscape. Minor’s writing is unerringly lyric and blooming with elegant charm and keen description. This book is an alchemy of fortitude in the face of despair and all the transformative possibility that comes with the hope for a better future.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Laura Minor won the Rita Dove Poetry Award (chosen by Marilyn Nelson), the Sassaman Graduate Creative Writing Award, the International Literary Award, and the Emerging Writers Spotlight Award, chosen by poet D.A. Powell. She was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She was named one of the "10 Acclaimed FSU English Professors That Will Inspire You" by collegemagazine.com. Her poetry is forthcoming or has most recently appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, The Missouri Review, The Normal School, South Carolina Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, and the 2021 New Rivers Press anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic In Contemporary Poetry and Prose. She was a Teachers College Fellow at Columbia University and was chosen by Denise Duhamel for a Sarah Lawrence Poetry Award. She holds a PhD from Florida State University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. She currently lives near the Appalachian Trail.
REVIEWS
"This is the magnificent story of ruining things, weeping bottles, flying tuna-fish sandwiches," writes Minor in her panoramic debut that explores setting (mostly Florida), relationships with men and women, illness, friendship, depression, and suicidal ideation. Its dedication "to women everywhere who refuse to give up their dreams" signals the collection’s interest in resilience. Readers will enjoy Minor’s fierce, unabashed voice.”
—Publishers Weekly
“One of the greatest pleasures I take in poetry is that feeling of camaraderie: the shared space of mutual humanity. That sense of belonging in the world, even with all its volatilities and uncertainties. And Laura Minor’s poems deliver on that pleasure. Achingly real and ever aspiring, this book is full of wonder, full of longing and its rewards. ‘I guess I just wanted to see snow falliing from the sky,’ she writes and ‘I will open a small sea for you.’ I find these poems so gratifying, so necessary. Tender and awake to what’s possible.”
—D.A. Powell author of Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys
"There had been Empire. There had been metamorphosis. Now, after that love and that music and that dream of Rome, the poet must come to terms with being human, must accept being one thing instead of many, exiled by Time back to the finality of the body. This is Flowers as Mind Control. Like her co-pilot, the Ovid of the Black Sea Letters, Laura Minor comes off like a fallen god, stranded on barbarian ramparts, piecing together the new real."
—Josh Bell, author of Alamo Theory
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Foreword by John Hodgen
Isolation Prayer
Primal
The Ricketiest Song in the World
Exiled in Palatka
Aubade
You’ve Got the Whole House Fighting
Real Town & Country
Fall Invitation
Prayer for the Water to Hold Us
For Every Jesus, a Woman
Drinking to Excess After Much Has Gone Wrong
Ode Calling Out John Hughes, Director
Lungfish
Unburden
Because We Will Not Always Be
Edward Leedskalnin, 1887-1951, Raised the Coral Castle
To Be Alone Is a Gift
Open Window on State St.
In the Lilacs
I Don’t Camp Well
With Guitar in Hand
A Fairly Serious Relationship
Recidivism
What Was Here, If Not Angels
Winged
Leaving Baby Island
The Lost Body a Music Makes
The Murder Hole, Brooklyn, NY 2011
Aqua Queen
Elegy for Marina without the War and Famine
Home State
Flowers as Mind Control
New Girl at the Seed Factory
Pocket Change
Reunion
For Want of You
Nine-Dollar Bacon
In Fellini’s Nights of Cabiria, the Eponymous Female Lead Survives
In Fractals of Matter on Earth Where Heaven Is a Metaphor for Heaven
Everything Beautifully Sideways
Supplication by the Sea on Labor Day
Bildungsroman in Red
Manifesto for the New World
Addendum
Acknowledgments
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC