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9781632431295

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"""These candid and skillful poems from Scanlon offer original observations about aging, motherhood, and life as a woman on an increasingly unstable planet. . . .  Scanlon’s excellent collection is determined to see to the heart of living and invites readers to do the same."" * Publishers Weekly starred review * ""Take that, Batman. Scanlon gives The Dark Knight the finger and it’s a beautiful thing because these poems in Whosoever Whole are the real superheroes. These poems have the power to embrace and heal the rotting and the hurt and the glorious joy in the Gotham of your heart. I’m talking: they will provide a quietness the instant that you read them and then long after you have read them. Because time is a personified swimmer wearing a Speedo hurtling past the breaking waves. Because beauty is headed out the door. Because you get to play mini-golf under a LOVE sculpture on the Winter Solstice. It is this kind of joyful quiet that persists. This is the super-hero human-hero power of this book, of these poems. The joyous quiet. Scanlon’s poems are meditations and meditative and  Whosoever Whole is a collection of poems that is monk-like – naked, on a boulder in the middle of some clean, cold river, getting as close to the quiet as a woman who is good with a knife because she can peel the apple in one long peel. Whosoever Whole is that one long peel that keeps on going into the dark night making us complete, completing the uncompleted, into a stillness of delight, that simply put, makes one feel good.""   -- Matthew Lippman, author of ""We Are All Sleeping with Our Sneakers On"" ""Whosoever Whole is a sly, winking book of magic. It threatens to read your browser history and luxuriates in the chaos of a South Philly bus ride. Scanlon's poems are warm and funny, but always with a sharp edge that takes on pregnancy, parenting, and getting older with a punk energy that kept me smiling. It’s a fun, real, raw book that I can’t wait to keep coming back to.""   -- Warren C. Longmire, author of ""Bird/Diz: An Erased History of Bebop"" ""In Scanlon’s Whosoever Whole, an ardent voice cuts over our commodity-driven culture’s insistence on endless striving and complacency amid ecological and systemic collapse. These poems call out the epochal crises that threaten our survival while remaining deftly attuned to the rage, desire, frustration, and conviction that keep one from capitulating to a wonder-bereft society. Spending 'hours on the internet / looking for something to hurt you' and feeling adrift in this craven, late capitalist reality may be unavoidable, but Scanlon adeptly orients us toward what’s remarkable: 'There is / spirit, and that is boundless.'  With the intimacy of a beloved linking their arm with yours on the walk home after a long night, the speaker wryly reminds us of our interconnectedness ('My guy, our fates are combining / all the time'), channeling how wild and precarious it is to be alive and the reasons to continue: 'I can only believe / that the revolution is still coming / and we will be here for it.'"" -- Alina Pleskova, author of ""Toska"""

"""These candid and skillful poems from Scanlon offer original observations about aging, motherhood, and life as a woman on an increasingly unstable planet. . . .  Scanlon’s excellent collection is determined to see to the heart of living and invites readers to do the same."" * Publishers Weekly starred review *"

"""Assuming an anticapitalist perspective on life, self, and womanhood, Scanlon proposes questions about culture, consumption, parenthood in the time of climate change, and the complex lives of contemporary women."" * Publishers Weekly *"

Author Information

Elizabeth Scanlon is the author of Lonesome Gnosis and Odd Regard. Her poems have appeared in many magazines, including Boston Review, Bennington Review, Poetry London, and Poetry Ireland. She is the editor-in-chief of the American Poetry Review and lives in Philadelphia.   

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