Odessa Poems

by Kirkpatrick, Patricia

• ISBN13: 9781571314567
• ISBN10: 1571314563
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-12-11
• Publisher: Milkweed Editions

Summary

A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick’s Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the “emotional core of the self,” and central to the process of memory. In poems endowed with this emotional charge but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick sets out to recreate what was lost by fashioning a dreamlike reality. Odessa, “roof of the underworld,” a refuge at once real and imagined, resembles simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a mythical god-inhabited city. In image-packed lines bearing shades of Classical heroism, Kirkpatrick delivers a personal narrative of stunning dimension.

Author Biography

Patricia Kirkpatrick is the author of Century’s Road (Holy Cow! Press, 2004) as well as several books for young readers and chapbooks of poetry. Her work has appeared widely in journals including Prairie Schooner, Poetry, Agni Online, Threepenny Review, Saint Paul Almanac, and Antioch Review, and additionally in several anthologies, among them Robert Bly In This World (University of Minnesota Press, 2011) and She Walks in Beauty: A Woman’s Journey Through Poems, edited by Caroline Kennedy (Hyperion Voice, 2005). She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and two Loft-McKnight awards. Currently the poetry editor for Water~Stone Review, Kirkpatrick lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.