The Bamboo Wife - Sevick, Leona

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Résumé :
Leona Sevick's The Bamboo Wife captures the experiences of an imperfect woman held up against the standard of good wife and mother. Sevick is a master of metaphor and imagery, depicting, for example, a mother as a kraken. In the sea creature's words, It takes a hard-ass woman to raise her young. Every poem is wrought with precise description and emotion. We get nature as well as some location-based poems orienting us in Korea. There is anger and sadness, the animal need to run in all directions at once, and family trauma both past and present. This trauma is inflicted on the speaker as a child and to some degree perpetuated through her own parenting. The collection asks the reader to provide space in poetry for a woman trying to do her best for her own and others' sake, for one who has made bad decisions and lived. Every poem is necessary, and Sevick makes each word count. Honesty carries this collection through her speaker's good, bad, and ugly moments. It takes courage for someone to say, there's no mistake I haven't made....

Biographie:
Leona Sevick is the winner of the Press 53 Award for Poetry for her first full-length book of poems, Lion Brothers. Her work appears in Orion, Birmingham Poetry Review, Blackbird, The Southern Review, and The Sun. She was a 2019 Walter E. Dakin Fellow and 2018 Tennessee Williams Scholar for the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and she serves as an advisory board member of the Furious Flower Black Poetry Center at James Madison University. She is provost and professor of English at Bridgewater College in Virginia, where she teaches Asian American literature. The Bamboo Wife is her second full-length collection of poems.

Sommaire:
Leona Sevick's The Bamboo Wife captures the experiences of an imperfect woman held up against the standard of good wife and mother. Sevick is a master of metaphor and imagery, depicting, for example, a mother as a kraken. In the sea creature's words, It takes a hard-ass woman to raise her young. Every poem is wrought with precise description and emotion. We get nature as well as some location-based poems orienting us in Korea. There is anger and sadness, the animal need to run in all directions at once, and family trauma both past and present. This trauma is inflicted on the speaker as a child and to some degree perpetuated through her own parenting. The collection asks the reader to provide space in poetry for a woman trying to do her best for her own and others' sake, for one who has made bad decisions and lived. Every poem is necessary, and Sevick makes each word count. Honesty carries this collection through her speaker's good, bad, and ugly moments. It takes courage for someone to say, there's no mistake I haven't made....