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My Second Work

“The soul remembers all of this. How I swept the floor / with my golden hair. How I fed it watermelon and wine / from a porcelain dish. How I called it teacher and it called me teacher’s pet.”

Metaphysical in concern and hypermodern in tone, Bridget Lowe returns in this appropriately titled, much-anticipated second collection, determined as ever to make meaning from the perversity of suffering. My Second Work is rare in its ability to be both completely idiosyncratic and widely resonant, as Lowe transforms experiences of shame, disgust, and bewilderment into a kind of mutant hope. Poems in this collection have appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry and were honored by the Poetry Society of America.

72 pages | 5 1/2 x 8 1/2 | © 2020

Carnegie Mellon University Press Poetry Series

Poetry


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Reviews

“No poet writing today is more direct than Lowe: at the same time, no poet is more uncanny, more seductively strange. These poems love the world that does not always love them back. They’re brilliant, scary, and heartbreakingly alive.”

James Longenbach, author of How Poems Get Made

"The contemplative second collection from Lowe (At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky) blends stories of childhood and family with astute reveries and allegories, fusing the familiar and the strange and evoking the qualities of a modern parable...The confounding nature of pain and suffering is transformed by Lowe’s modern and accessible verse."

Publishers Weekly

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