Keynote
The second collection by award-winning poet Joanna Rawson, whose "intense language recalls the hothouse prose of Cormac McCarthy."—Kirkus Reviews
Book Title
Unrest
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- "Rawson is a piercingly passionate, necessary artist. The riches in Unrest are as demanding as they are beautiful."—The Rumpus
Body
The sky threatens to answer a prayer but then won't.
It is not exactly our own minds we go out of.
—from "The Insurgency"
A man’s sister sews him into a bus seat. Stowaway immigrants suffocate in a crowded boxcar. The first female suicide bomber passes through a checkpoint. Joanna Rawson’s Unrest shows the fervent, if not desperate, side of humanity pressed to the limits. With a resonant lyricism and profound beauty, these poems are restless meditations on American life, political borders, lawlessness, parenthood, and the spaces where the natural world and human turmoil come into conflict. Here is the voice of the poet at one moment in contemplation and at the next in emotional outcry, stuttering into song.
It is not exactly our own minds we go out of.
—from "The Insurgency"
A man’s sister sews him into a bus seat. Stowaway immigrants suffocate in a crowded boxcar. The first female suicide bomber passes through a checkpoint. Joanna Rawson’s Unrest shows the fervent, if not desperate, side of humanity pressed to the limits. With a resonant lyricism and profound beauty, these poems are restless meditations on American life, political borders, lawlessness, parenthood, and the spaces where the natural world and human turmoil come into conflict. Here is the voice of the poet at one moment in contemplation and at the next in emotional outcry, stuttering into song.
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About the Author
Credit: Stephen Mohring
Praise
- "Page after page [Rawson] lays down achingly beautiful art which has, at its heart, a dead-serious and steely-eyed consciousness."—Corduroy Books
- “Unrest mourns the loss of an innocent belief in a world without catastrophe. The speaker stands, inconsolable, on a brink between order and debris, without a language to convey it.”—Malinda Markham, The Antioch Review
- "Vivid, nature-aided description is what makes Rawson's poetry so potent. Unrest is bound to shake up your perception and that is exactly the intent."—Minnesota Reads
- "Each line is balanced, as is the book, despite its overwhelming intimacy of terror."—The Feminist Review
