Customer Reviews

Becoming Bone: Poems On the Life of Celia Thaxter (1835-1894)

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Annie Boutelle is a senior lecturer at Smith College and the founder of the Smith College Poetry Center. Becoming Bone: Poems On The Life Of Celia Thaxter (1836-1894) is a biography-in-poetry anthology that probes and reveals the life of one of 19th Century America's most popular poets, but who is now an almost forgotten name in American letters. An accomplished and award-winning poet, Annie Boutelle does her unusual subject full and complete literary justice framed as only a seasoned and gifted wordsmith can. Her verse is as hauntingly memorable as it is deftly structured. Land-Locked (Newtonville, 1861): Turning her back on brawling/boys, unemptied chamber pots,/the bolted bedroom door, she/dips her pen in gullible ink://Have patience; here are flowers and songs of birds,/Beauty and fragrance, wealth of sound and sight,/All summer's glory thine from morn till night,/And life too full of joy for uttered words.//She learns to lie, calls it her "little poem."/They pay ten dollars, and she recalls/how last summer Mrs. Bliven said no one/is paid for making a string of shells.

If you appreciate poetry, you should read her book.

Professor Boutelle if you're reading this: absolutely exquisite.