Forbidden Words: Poems [Paperback]

Patricia Traxler (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The bitterness of loss flows through Traxler's ( The Glass Women ) third collection like a powerful astringent. Having lost her faith in love, the poet hones her rage into scalpel-sharpness, probing and excising a lifetime of hurt. The first lesson in disappointment was learned at the knee of an immigrant grandmother for whom "the way to pain / Was joy, and ever after that the way / to pay for joy was pain." The writer's dramatic sense and the controlled elegance of her language ironically counterpose the poetry's intense emotional substratum. In "High Wire" she constructs a metaphor for the adrenalin-fraught anxiety of falling in love: "And now I find myself here, balanced / on groundless terrain, sucked ever outward on the wire, / past return . . . I only learn / I'm falling when I've fallen and time has stopped / like a failed heart." "Confession" is a riveting monologue exposing the web of dependency that has ensnared a battered wife in a cycle of denial and abuse: "I never told anyone, even my mother, / what he'd done because that would have given / my worst secret away: my life was a lie / and I was the liar; only a liar would stay." These poems strike a thrilling balance between personal disclosure and the rigors of writing.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Booklist

Traxler takes us on a dive into the wilderness waters of recall. Speaking of need and truth and the need for naked truth, she recalls a Catholic youth in which a particular Tuesday night became "family rosary night," its memory a kind of eternal holy stasis, and in which such "ordinary miracles" as stigmata and apparitions were much easier to explain to a girlhood friend than such private, lower-profile miracles as the sea's voices. She summons the memory of a physically abusive lover holding a .38 caliber gun to her and finds it, ultimately, not nearly as frightening as the web of lies built around a life of shame and fear. Throughout her memories runs the quest for fearless knowledge of one's own interior and intimate self. Whitney Scott --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 18 and up
  
• Paperback: 64 pages
• Publisher: University of Missouri; 1St Edition edition (May 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0826209351
• ISBN-13: 978-0826209351
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.6 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #7,855,303 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Award-winning poet and fiction writer Patricia Traxler is the author of three collections of poetry, Forbidden Words (University of Missouri), The Glass Woman (Hanging Loose Press), Blood Calendar (William Morrow), and a novel, Blood (St. Martins Press), which was also published in the U.K., and in Spanish, Swedish, and German translations.

A two-time Bunting Poetry Fellow at Radcliffe, Traxler also served as Hugo Poet at the University of Montana and Thurber Writer-in-Residence at Ohio State. She has lectured, read, or been a visiting writer at many other US universities, including the University of California, San Diego; Emerson College, Boston; Old Dominion University, Virginia; Westminster College, Salt Lake City; San Diego State University; Utah State University; and Kansas University, Lawrence.

Traxler was born and raised in San Diego, California, one of eight children in a working-class Irish-Catholic family. She was much influenced by her maternal grandmother, Nora Dunne, a published poet from County Cork, Ireland, who lived with the family for several years during Traxler's childhood. "Around our house on a daily basis," Traxler says, "I saw Gran working on her poetry in a green clothbound ledger, and I often heard her reciting poems like 'Thanatopsis' or 'To a Skylark,' just for the delight she took in them, so poetry always seemed an ordinary and essential part of life to me."

In addition to her own writing, Traxler has published two personal history anthologies: Vintage (Smoky Hill River Press), which contains first-person recollections ranging back in time to the first World War, and In Our Time (Smoky Hill River Press), which collects the memories of people who grew up on the Great Plains during the years from 1910-1975.

"Some of my most rewarding teaching experiences have come outside the world of academe, working with the elderly and with special needs groups," Traxler says. She has developed writing programs and projects for the deaf and hearing-impaired, for cancer patients, for homeless women and victims of domestic violence, and for mental health and stroke patients. "All of these experiences have been of great value to me," she says, "in particular for what they've taught me about the endless possibilities and complexities of human connection."

Traxler is a past recipient of Ploughshares' Cohen Award, Nimrod's Pablo Neruda Award, The Writer's Voice of New York City Open Voice Award for Short Fiction, the Hackney Literary Award for Short Fiction, Radcliffe's Presidential Discretionary Award, a Kansas Literary Fellowship, two Poetry Society of America Writer's Magazine/​Emily Dickinson Award honors, the Alice Carter Award for Poetry, and the Georgia State University Award for Short Fiction. She is also a past Grand Prize winner of the International Imitation Hemingway Competition.

Her poetry and fiction have appeared in many publications, including The Nation, Slate, Agni, The Boston Review, The Kenyon Review, Ms. Magazine, Hanging Loose, Tikkun, Glimmer Train, The American Voice, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and New Letters, as well as in a number of anthologies, including Best American Poetry (A.R. Ammons, editor), A Handbook of Heartbreak (Robert Pinsky, editor), A Ring of Words (Andrew Motion, editor), Tangled Vines (Beacon Press), e: the Emily Dickinson Award Anthology (Universities West), and The Best of Bad Hemingway: Award Anthology (Harcourt).

Traxler's essays have appeared in Newsweek and the anthologies Night Errands: How Poets Use Dreams (University of Pittsburgh Press), and Grandmothers: Granddaughters Remember (Syracuse University Press). Traxler lives in Kansas and has just finished her second novel, The Hunger Season, and is completing work on her fourth poetry collection, The Fires, and her first collection of short stories, I'll Always Love You (unless you love me, too), which looks with a darkly humorous eye at romantic love, fidelity and infidelity, the politics of sex, single life and marriage, and the question of when, if ever, it all begins to make sense.

website: www.patriciatraxler.com

Literary Agent: Gail Hochman, Brandt and Hochman Literary Agents, 1501 Broadway, New York, NY 10036