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Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King has won the 2024 National Book Award for Translated Literature!!!  Buy now
Book Title

In the Middle Distance

Author 1
Linda Gregg
Body

In one poem in this emotional and spiritual collection, Linda Gregg asks, "It is clear why love / took me to the shore of death, / but why did it bring me back?" In the Middle Distance, Gregg's sixth book, explores up to and beyond the crossroads of devastation and desire. There, Gregg find not only survival but also salvation—hard won, resilient, and meaningful. This collection brings Gregg's passion and intensity together with a new wisdom and vitality that is unmistakably original. "I have loved Linda Gregg's poems since I first read them. They are original in the way that really matters: they speak clearly of their source. They are inseparable from the surprising, unrolling, eventful, pure current of their language, and they convey at once the pain of individual loss, a steady and utterly personal radiance.—W.S. Merwin"Linda Gregg continues to be the builder of beautiful contraptions, poems built steadfastly by real life, bright and stark, truths told tranquil inunblinding light."—Lucie Brock-Broido


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List Price
$14.00
ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-439-8
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
80
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote

A new and resplendent collection by Linda Gregg, whose poems "have the elegance of Greek statuary and the good-humored poise of haiku."—Poetry


About the Author

Linda  Gregg
Credit: Hal Lum
Linda Gregg was the author of seven books of poetry: Too Bright to See, Alma, The Sacraments of Desire, Chosen by the Lion, Things and FleshIn the Middle Distance, and All of It Singing: New and Selected Poems, which received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets and the William Carlos Williams Award from the Poetry Society of America, among others. Gregg received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She received the PEN/Voelcker Award in Poetry for achievement across her career. She died in 2019.
 
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Praise

  • “[Gregg’s] poetry breaks and devours comforting sentiments, soothing language, elevated humbug, wishful thinking. . . . [Her poetry] menaces or devours not flesh and blood but cozy preconceptions.”—The Washington Post
  • “In the gorgeous and conflicted middle distance of Gregg’s poems, “the sun…is always going down,” and the speaker is walking and thinking of love and solitude and silence, leaving the reader to lavish in the charged intimacies of the moment.”—Boston Review
  • “This is a powerful account of facing later life on one’s own.”—Publishers Weekly
  • “Greggs finest so far explores…logic with real tenacity and intelligence.”—Poetry
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