Allow Me - Willis, Irene

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Résumé :
Since receiving her first / rejection slip at the age of ten through her father's dismissal of women writers, Irene Willis has written past his disapproval, learning / my mother's language and drawing on the lives of both parents to craft memorable poems on gender, ageing, and mortality. As she acknowledges with wistfulness and humor my own end near, she considers the word deceased: I'm writing this / after names / in my address book. / It's better than / crossing them out, and recalls a poet who paid homage to her dog / by tasting its ashes. In poems praised previously by Maxine Kumin and Alicia Ostriker, Irene Willis conveys a life rich in its ordinariness and extraordinary in its loves. Through the decades-long making of these poems, that ten-year-old has come to recognize that her mind was hers, and hers alone. -Michael Waters Michael Waters has been called one of the best American poets writing today, praised for his pleasure in the figurative and musical possibilities of language. His latest book is Caw; others are Celestial Joyride, Gospel Night, Darling Vulgarity and Parthenopi: New and Selected Poems. He has received five Pushcart prizes and many other awards and fellowships for his work.

Biographie:
Irene Willis is a poet, writer and longtime educator who has taught at many schools and colleges. Before she ever published poetry, she co-authored a children's book and two volumes in a major textbook series with her first husband, the late Richard Willis. Years later, with psychoanalyst Arlene Kramer Richards, she co-authored four books for young adults. Her published poems began to appear in the 1970's, but it wasn't until 1995, after she had been awarded a Distinguished Artist fellowship by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, that her first full-length collection, They Tell Me You Danced (University Press of Florida), appeared in print. Since then, she has published three more books of poems: At the Fortune Caf? (Snake Nation Press, 2005,) winner of the Violet Reed Haas Award and nominated for a National Book Award; Those Flames, a finalist for the Philip Levine Prize and released by Bay Oak Publishers, Ltd.(2009), and Reminder (Word Poetry, 2014). A three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she has had grants and awards from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts; the Millay Colony for the Arts; the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Berkshire/Taconic Foundation. The holder of an M.A. and Ph.D. from New York University and M.F.A. in Poetry from New England College, she is Poetry Editor of the web-based International Psychoanalysis, where her column Poetry Monday appears monthly. She is a member of the Authors' Guild, and an Educator Associate of the International Psychoanalytic Association.