Praise and Reviews

“These essays are dishy, spoken in the voice of a confidant, as Bourgeois tucks each poet’s line inside a closet of her own stories, secrets, and desires. What’s astonishing is the way she can unpack an idea, a feeling, an experience, or an especially dense or opaque line of poetry so deftly and completely, as if picking apart a hopeless knot in an impossibly delicate chain. Once untangled, a truth sparkles under the beam of her bright intelligence. Though the pieces reckon with literature and theory across time, the ageless themes are housed firmly in their modern context: Power, Death, Religion, Marriage, Beauty, Femininity, Motherhood, Love, God. If poetry is a distillation, these essays offer a concentrated drop of truth reconstituted in a personal and cultural moment.” —from the foreword by Daneen Bergland

About the Author

Wendy Bourgeois is a poet and writer. In addition to the essays she writes for her regular column in Propeller, her poems have appeared in Cirque, Portland Review, and other small press journals. She is a writing instructor at Portland Community College and Portland State University. This is her first book.