The Bunker Book - Babson, Anne

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Résumé :

The Bunker Book is a work of poetry by Anne Babson that revisits medieval plague tales in an era of American pandemic and French Resistance literature in a divided nation. Set in New Orleans and other cosmopolitan destinations, it presents the problems of Kyiv, of the Second World War, and all fights against fascism as a way of talking about America today. This poetry collection makes the new cosmopolitan South confront the ghosts of the old problematic South and exorcise them. While it occasionally echoes sentiments present in Atwood's work, it offers hope to the reader despite all. Focused on the life of a woman who hides herself and the books banned in an oppressive society in a bunker, her library comes to life and speaks to her in the voices of figures like Machiavelli, the Wife of Bath, Marlene Dietrich, Margery Kempe, Rhett Butler, Saint Thomas Moore, and Christine de Pisan. It contemplates the cloistered life of pandemic and religious medieval women mystics in one idiom. It imagines the underground resistance of Paris during the Nazi occupation reenacted in our times in an American setting.Works as old as Beowulf find themselves enacted on the banks of the Mississippi, and poems as present-tense as the latest headlines about the war in Ukraine also find a home on Tchoupitoulas Street in New Orleans.

The Bunker Book ...

Biographie:
Anne Babson's first collection The White Trash Pantheon won the Colby H. Kullman prize from the Southern Writers Southern Writing Conference in Oxford, Mississippi. Her second collection, Polite Occasions, was published by Unsolicited Press, and her third collection, Messiah, was published by Saint Julian Press. She wrote the libretto for the opera Lotus Lives, which has been performed in New York, Boston, and Montreal, and it is set to be released to video in coming months. She is the author of four chapbooks- Uppity Poems, Dictation, Poems Under Surveillance, and Dolly Shot. She has been anthologized in the United States and in England, most recently in the notable collection Nasty Women Poets: an Unapologetic Anthology of Subversive Verse released in 2017. Her work has appeared in literary journals on five continents and has won numerous editorial awards. Her play about gun culture in the South, Reenactment, was published in 2019. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize four times. She has received residency grants from Yaddo and Vermont Studio Center. She writes lyrics for a variety of musical projects, most recently a blues album. She teaches writing and literature at Southeastern Louisiana University. She is the president of the Women's National Book Association of New Orleans.

Sommaire:
calls the reader to hope despite reasons to despair, to overcome fear and to fight the forces that would silence artists and political dissidents everywhere. Anyone feeling frustrated with our times might take solace and encouragement from these defiant and hopeful words.