The Coronary Garden: Poems [Paperback]

Ann Townsend (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 2005

“Ah to be the one for whom the love poems in this sexy, brainy, elegant book were written.”—Linda Gregerson

The Coronary Garden is a collection braiding love and mortality. In “Love Poem, Unwritten,” Townsend identifies a physical abnormality of the poet’s heart as a figure for human love: fragile, vulnerable, our very imperfections opening us to connection and grace. Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics (1998). She lives in Granville, Ohio.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Ann Townsend is the author of Dime Store Erotics (1998). She is the recipient of a NEA Fellowship, an Individual Artist's grant from the Ohio Arts Council, and a Discovery Prize from The Nation. Her poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The Pushcart Prize XX, The New Young American Poets, American Poetry: The Next Generation, and The New American Poets: A Bread Loaf Anthology. An Associate Professor of English at Denison University, she lives in Granville, Ohio.

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Sarabande Books (January 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1932511091
• ISBN-13: 978-1932511093
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #706,996 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Ann Townsend is the author of two collections of poetry: The Coronary Garden (Sarabande Books, 2005), and Dime Store Erotics (Silverfish Review Press, 1998), winner of the Gerald Cable Prize. She also is the editor of a collection of essays, Radiant Lyre: on Lyric Poetry, (with David Baker), forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2007. Her poetry and essays appear in such magazines as Poetry, The Paris Review, The Nation, The Southern Review, and many others. She has read her poems and lectured on poetry and poetics at colleges, universities, writer's workshops, and bookstores around the country.

A member of the creative writing program at Denison University since 1992, she teaches courses in creative writing, twentieth century poetry and poetics, and the history of the lyric poem. She lives with her family on a small farm in Granville, Ohio. There they garden -- vegetables, flowers, herbs, and orchard trees -- and tend several acres of old-growth woods.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful poetry, December 6, 2005

By 

Virginia Reader (Virginia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Coronary Garden: Poems (Paperback)

Townsend is one of my favorite poets, and Coronary Garden is a brilliant book. The poems are lyrical, but have vivid narrative threads throughout them. They are beautiful, but there is often a terror, a haunt, a turmoil, at their hearts. A friend's suicide attempt, a striken child, a perilous love, a vanished father -- some of the stories beneath her stories. But I love most her very rich, dense, clear language. These poems sing. Read "Coronary Garden" or the poem about St. Veronica, and you'll see what I mean.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful poems, December 17, 2005

By 

Poetry Traveler (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Coronary Garden: Poems (Paperback)

I heard Ann Townsend read her poems in New York, and immediately got her book. Her poems are elegant but very tough-
minded, with sinew. Outloud they are lyrical, graceful, in her voice, and on the page the grace becomes more terse. I love the poems about children -- her daughter, a stricken child in a hospital -- and her sense of wit, which seems nearly metaphysical, in the way it constructs and sustains a metaphor or an argument, deepening it, making it all the more complex inside her well-wrought sentences. "The Reliquary" is a great example: "The world with its dangers / submits to me, / my spells, my potions, / for I outguess the heavens, / and with that blasphemy // which makes better my heart, / I tap the seat belt, / the helmet, the pavement / and other hard surfaces, / I carry a picture of you, // my purse a reliquary / of your totems...." Other favorites here: "Preparatory Meditation," and several love poems like "Your Body's Weight Upon Me" and "Old Fashioned Kissing," and a number of historical poems like "St. Veronica's Trials," which tells the story of Veronica Orsola, a medieval nun who saw visions (due to, probably, her chosen anorexia!). This is incredible poetry.