Overview

"Singing Is Praying Twice gives voice to an intergenerational community of women. ""[This poetry collection] is filled with pathos and empathy, populated with memorable characters who alternately amuse, enrage, puzzle, and pull at the heart. Taken together, these linked poems offer up a woman's life in all its complicated fullness, from childhood to motherhood and beyond. And running through and beneath these portraits, there is music-songs sung alone or with others, in unison or in parts, with instruments or unaccompanied, from polkas to lullabies, in sorrow or in joy. In this volume, Peel demonstrates, time and again, how 'singing is praying twice.'""-Laura Apol, author of A Fine Yellow Dust, winner of the Midwest Book Award for Poetry, and Lansing, Michigan, poet laureate (2019-2021) ""In this haunting and deeply felt poetry book, Marianne Peel examines the toll of familial love. Singing Is Praying Twice gives voice to an intergenerational community of women who demand their places in the world. Within an emotionally fraught landscape, where children bend to the whims of their parents and parents struggle to understand their children, Peel writes with the urgency of a truth-teller, sharing the details of a life lived with passion and pain, a place where no matter what happens, 'we carry each other home.'"" -Erica Goss, Los Gatos, California, poet laureate emerita and author of Night Court"

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9781945049453

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"""I know of no poet who can tell a story like Marianne Peel. Singing Is Praying Twice is filled with pathos and empathy, populated with memorable characters who alternately amuse, enrage, puzzle, and pull at the heart...[R]unning through and beneath these portraits, there is music... Peel demonstrates, time and again, how 'singing is praying twice.'"" -Laura Apol, author of A Fine Yellow Dust and Lansing, Michigan, poet laureate (2019-2021) ""In this haunting and deeply felt poetry book, Singing Is Praying Twice, Marianne Peel examines the toll of familial love... Within an emotionally fraught landscape... Peel writes with the urgency of a truth-teller, sharing the details of a life lived with passion and pain, a place where no matter what happens, 'we carry each other home.'"" -Erica Goss, Los Gatos, California, poet laureate emerita and author of Night Court ""Marianne Peel's poetry collection Singing Is Praying Twice reads like a song that demands you dance! It is full of the joy-and a little heartbreak-of lives well lived. Throughout, you will hear Peel's wonderful singing voice."" -Melva Sue Priddy, author of The Tillable Land ""Forgiveness permeates these poems. There is music and dancing and song amid inescapable loss and regret. Therein lies the beauty of Singing Is Praying Twice-the loss of innocence is the price we pay not only for experience but also for salvation."" -James Alan Riley, author of Uncertain Mythologies ""In these vivid, narrative poems, Marianne Peel is 'scuttling through the basement of memory' to make poems of family where domestic imagery sits comfortably with the iconography of patron saints, where parents, grandparents, siblings, and children are honestly rendered-an extended family full of secrets and joy. These frank and embodied portraits of ancestry and lineage are 'praise psalms' both beguiling and unforgettable."" -Marianne Worthington, author of The Girl Singer and editor of Still: The Journal"

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