My Own Fires [Paperback]

Lauren Hunter (Author), Harriett Van Os (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 8, 2011

What little we know of Harriet Van Os has been pieced together in Lauren Hunter’s brave, heart-wrenching prose and poetry collection, My Own Fires. Born in a Hialeah, Florida in 1921, Van Os was the eldest of 18 children, just minutes older than her twin brother, Constantine. After losing her entire family in a fire, which burned their country estate to the ground, Van Os moved to New York City, where she joined The Poetry Brothel and became a poet of some distinction, famous particularly for the spare, haunted verse that appeared each morning scrawled upon her bed sheets. Harriett Van Os has long been a literary mystery, but thanks to Lauren Hunter’s painstaking research into her history, we have been given the good fortune to handle her remaining poems, tactile and sincere, each like a trembling flame. "At once haunted and haunting, Lauren Hunter's multi-vocal and achingly audacious mixture of poetry and prose effectively engages issues of imagination and documentation, memory and displacement, and the crucial, complex ways in which memory itself is like fire." -- Laurie Sheck

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

LAUREN HUNTER is from North Carolina and lives in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in poetry from The New School and reads as Harriett Van Os with The Poetry Brothel. She has recently joined the team at Telephone Books as their Emperor of Ice Cream. Her poems can be found online in pax americana, Lyre Lyre, and Food I Corp Publishing Enterprise. She hates to sleep and loves to dance.

Product Details

• Paperback: 46 pages
• Publisher: Brothel Books (November 8, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0983421722
• ISBN-13: 978-0983421726
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.2 x 0.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,194,263 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)