Book Description

Her traveling poetrics are striking in the way that she defies the borders of "narrative" and "lyric"; she combines the two seamlessly, an enviable gift. --Sacramento News & Review These poems move through love and death, sadness and euphoria, and across European and American landscapes, encountering lovers, strangers, and beloved ghosts. They arrive, finally, in a place of beauty, mystery, grief, and joy. Poems from this collection were selected by Marie Howe as winner of the 2006 Tupelo Press Snowbound Chapbook Award. Cecilia Woloch was named 2004 Georgia Author of the Year in Poetry for her last collection, Late (BOA Editions, Ltd., 2003). She is founding director of the Summer Poetry Workshop in Idyllwild, California. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and Los Angeles, California, and travels extensively in Europe. From Devils Lake Journal: “Celia Woloch’s collection Carpathia is about distance, both physical and emotional. Her poems occupy a lush landscape where the natural world succombs to loss, where “fat bees [fall] into the wine” and the ghost swans have “wings of death.” The highlights of this collection are her numerous postcard poems which feel balanced in their attempts to be both strange and authentic without becoming burdened with ironic oddity that I’ve seen so much in recent poetry. Her postcards move, making leaps with each new sentence, and their prose-poem form opens these poems up to be more peculiar in a way that’s all-together successful.” From The Cosmopolitan Review: “One of the joys of Cecilia Woloch’s poetry is that it so beautifully and skilfully intermingles humour with emotional intensity, sensuality, and existential profoundness...Underneath it all, there lies a clear conviction that each of us could have been somebody else, could have been born and lived somewhere else, and yet “We all dwell in one country, O stranger, the world.”