Kore of the Incantation [Hardcover]

Brooke Elise Axtell (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2010

Featured in The San Francisco Chronicle:
Boise, Idaho, February 20, 2011 -- Brooke Axtell refuses to be silenced. As a survivor of rape and abuse, she has transformed her pain into a powerful message of hope. In her new book of poetry, Kore of the Incantation, she explores gender violence, Goddess spirituality, women's rights and healing through the creative process. Axtell's poetry has been hailed as "very forceful...extremely sophisticated and polyvalent" by renowned Beat poet Anne Waldman. Karen Subach, poet, fiction writer and Pushcart Prize nominee, says her poetry has "engaging passion...idiosyncratic, wild-woman details, an intriguing sense of woman emerging from stasis into true self." Through her work with Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network (RAINN), the largest anti-sexual assault organization in the United States, Axtell raises awareness and guides others through recovery. "I want to help women reclaim their worth and power, so they can fulfill their creative dreams. It is my passion to see survivors of rape and abuse begin to value who they are and truly thrive," she says. In her conversations as an advocate, Axtell encourages women to reconnect with their creative gifts. This has been essential for her own recovery. She says, "Sexual assault sends the message that our voices, our desires do not matter. Art is a sacred space for embracing the truth of our experience, so we can begin to heal."She offers a different kind of healing guide, one that demonstrates the pain and beauty of struggling to live a meaningful life after the brutality of sexual violence. In "love letter to a survivor" she writes, "you are not a sickness to be cured, but a miracle & mystery unfolding."

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Engaging passion...idiosyncratic, wild-woman details...intriguing sense of woman emerging from stasis into true self..."

--Karen Subach, poet and fiction writer, MFA University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, Pushcart Prize nominee

"an accomplished poet, with a deeply developed voice and craft...tapping into a spirituality that comes from the American experience...{the} poetry is a chant, a spell even."

--Rebecca Reilly, The New School, Editor of LIT magazine

"Very forceful...the work is extremely sophisticated and polyvalent...I am also very excited about {her} powers as a performer/singer."


--Anne Waldman, Poet, Distinguished Professor of Poetics, Naropa University

From the Inside Flap

Brooke Axtell's mesmerizing poetry explores the thirst for solace in desolate spaces. It is a thirst for cleansing, healing and rejuvenation. In her third collection of poems, she plunges the body of pain, the "remembering body", into the renewing element of water. With fierce elegance, she reveals the core thirst of life: to experience all as sacred. Her gift of striking imagery and stunning, musical language has the power to haunt and heal. She transmutes pain into incantation. This is the alchemy of the artist. Just as Kore of Greek myth was forced into the underworld and initiated into a cycle of ascension, Axtell investigates a realm of ruin and rises to share a new vision of life. Her poems confront the ravages of violence with the relentless hope of the creative process. She explores the archetype of the wild woman, the sacred marriage of the soul, the cost of injustice, the modern sex industry, the Divine Feminine and the gift of intimacy that honors the emergence of the true untamed nature. Here is the map of one woman's spiritual journey. You will find solace in these waters, "the healing waterfall behind the ancient wall."

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 246 pages
• Publisher: Persephone Media (October 1, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0984451307
• ISBN-13: 978-0984451302
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 9 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,112,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Brooke Axtell is a singer, songwriter and poet from Austin, Texas. She is the winner of the Phyllis Smart Young Prize for Poetry. The winning selections: "kore of the incantation" "Frida" and "border girls" are included in her upcoming book KORE OF THE INCANTATION. Her last book of poetry, DAUGHTER OF THE BURNING, was nominated for The Violet Crown Award by the Texas Writer's League. She won "Best Traditional Ballad of the Year" from KOOP Radio, Austin (91.7 FM) and first place for her short story "Maya's Mirror" in the Young Texas Writer's Awards.

Brooke has performed in countless venues with artists such as English pop star Dido and internationally recognized drummer, Terry Bozzio (of Frank Zappa). She collaborated with producers Stephen Bruton (guitarist for Bonnie Raitt), Charlie Sexton (guitarist for Bob Dylan) and Mitch Watkins (guitarist for Leonard Cohen and Lyle Lovett). Over the course of her career, she has released 3 collections of poetry and 3 CDs of original music.

Brooke is a passionate advocate for survivors of sexual assault and domestic violence. She works with RAINN (Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network) http://www.rainn.org, the largest anti-sexual assault organization in the United States. She is also a member of the Idaho Coalition Against Sexual and Domestic Violence and regularly gives radio interviews on top 40 radio stations.

Her poetry and music are featured on her website http://www.brookeaxtell.com.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Powerful; Poet February 27, 2011

By Robert L. Champ

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

"Kore of the Incantation" is one of those books about which one cannot remain neutral. It takes the reader into a cauldron of emotions: nothing of the favored irony of many contemporary poets is apparent in it. Ms. Axtell is utterly sincere. The anger--rage--in the book is transparent, but the poet also reaches for resolution and spiritual renewal. These is more to the book, however, than a cri de coeur. Ms. Axtell has created some of the most astonishing and original images and metaphors that I have read in a long while. Only a true poet is capable of finding such connections, such verbal energy, and Ms. Axtell is one of those.

Many of these poems are painful, but they are always interesting and often beautiful. If you are interested in contemporary poetry, Ms. you will find Axtell's book a rewarding experience.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Surfeit of Riches June 6, 2011

By candicemaddy

Format:Hardcover

Brooke Elise Axtell is a beauty at once statuesque and smoldering. I had the pleasure of traveling through Kenya with her last December during a writer's workshop, where I was treated to my first (pre-release!) read of Kore of the Incantation, whose own beauty resides in the tension between burning intensity and fluid grace. Triple-threat Axtell is an award-winning poet, singer-songwriter, and advocate for Rape, Abuse, Incest National Network (RAINN), and as a survivor of rape and abuse, testament to the phenomenal healing powers of creativity. At just under 250 pages, her third collection of poetry is relentless, a confidently authored and uncompromising exploration of what Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Karen Subach describes as "woman emerging from stasis into true self." It is an incredibly, often distressingly personal trajectory of self-discovery, and Axtell exposes without shame, drawing on the rich mythological, spiritual, and historical feminine for sustenance.

From Ancient Greece to dim-lit hotel suites to the border town of Juarez, her verse hungers for life, her voice refuses to be stilled in its many incarnations. And if the writing is varied, nowhere is it more so, and more appealing than in that plural voice; her tone vacillates between the extremes, coy here, scraped off the bottom of an ashtray there, at times peacockish and at others deceptively simple. Her writing is sexy and unabashed, violent and effective- a lovely, if sometimes vulgar, untamed creature. Far from denying the highly sexualized wild-woman archetypes, her poems are an embodied repossession of them, at once hyperconscious of the male gaze and emboldened by it.

In "Beautifully Useless" she writes, "i have learned that a woman cannot be/ too fierce or too tender./ i dare to dip my brush into every rich hue of my palette." No colour is spared. Indeed, Axtell's poetry uses colour sensually, and often to disquieting effect, particularly in "Border Girls", with its delicious language drawing the horror of its subject taut : "foreplay in the desert /(purpling with her molasses) /the murdered body swells. she devours herself/ from the inside out, pink snake feeding/ on its own tail./ [...] the fingernails remember./the remembering: black.[...]"

As a poet, I can't help the pang of jealousy that surfaces when I come across words I wish I'd come up with first, be it a particularly striking metaphor, or an unlikely and arresting composite of images. With contemporary poetry trending towards an increasingly subtle aesthetic, Axtell's language is by comparison luscious, her poems saturated with rich, inventive verse. She luxuriates unabashedly in conjuring detailed images- the more dramatic, the better- and weaves them together without concern for metaphorical continuity. In "Bitch", she writes, "she roams the bleak streets in orphan clothes/ praying the stars will turn to bones & bury themselves/ in the pink graveyard of her jaw./ [...] yet she remains as irresistible/ as a brown sugar skin woman fingering a pomegranate./ she is rabid for the fresh bread of your neck [...]" In the same instance of wanting to propound the benefit of a metaphorical conceit, I find myself charmed by her overflowing verse, and am reminded of another siren's famous words: "Too much of a good thing can be wonderful."

1 of 4 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars Karen Subach Did Not Give a Blurb for This Book February 29, 2012

By anon

Format:Hardcover

I wish the author the best with her work, but I want to be clear that the phrase taken entirely out of context comes from my swiftly-written comment on a poem submitted to me during a weekend workshop at the Iowa Summer Writing Festival. At no time was I furnished with a copy of the author's manuscript, and at no time was I asked to write a blurb for this author's book. I was unable to submit this review without offering a rating. The one star is purely for the sake of submitting the clarification that I did not at any time write a blurb for this book. Karen Subach