Winner of the sixth annual May Swenson Poetry Award, The Owl Question underscores and relishes life’s transitions—from young girl to woman, from child to wife to mother, and from isolation to connection—this poet’s bright sense of abundance and awe, here expressed in finely tuned detail and refreshingly open observation, reads like a collective memory. Though private and closely held, these questionings are as familiar as our own souls, and in their transformation to poetry, Shearin has created the very "map" she wishes to guide her when she "can’t learn the world fast enough."
| |||||||||||||||
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
"What she wishes, wisely, is to be able to love and to see clearly at once." -- Mark Doty
About the Author
FAITH SHEARIN was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and writer-in-residence at Interlochen Arts Academy. Her poems have appeared in journals that include Ploughshares, Chicago Review, Poetry Northwest and many others. She has worked in a taffy store, interviewed elk hunters, read tea leaves and taught high school English. She earned her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College and currently resides in Baltimore, where she is visiting writer at American University. The Owl Question is Faith Shearin’s first full-length book of poems.
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Faith Shearin's books include The Owl Question, which won the May Swenson Award, The Empty House (Word Press), and Moving the Piano (SFA University Press). She is the recipient of awards from the Fine Arts Work Center, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Recent work appears in Poetry East and The Sun. Her poems can also be found in The Autumn House Anthology of Contemporary American Poetry and in Garrison Keillor's Good Poems, American Places. She lives in Baltimore with her husband and daughter.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brief yet evocative verse,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Owl Question: Poems (May Swenson Poetry Award Series) (Hardcover)
Winner of the May Swenson poetry award, The Owl Question by Faith Shearin is a unique collection of brief yet evocative verse, featuring a foreword by Mark Doty (an international poet and the appointed judge for the 2002 May Swenson Award). Examining adolescence, nature, femininity, parenthood, daily life, and more, these inspirational and deftly written verses often carry a down-to-earth, narrative-event tone. My father, in middle age, falls in love with a dog./He who kicked dogs in anger when I was a child,/who liked his comb always on the same shelf,/who drank martinis to make his mind quiet./He who worked and worked/- his shirts/wrapped in plastic, his heart ironed/like a collar./He who - like many men -/ loved his children but thought the money/he made for them was more important/than the rough tweed of his presence.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Good First Book,
By A Customer
This review is from: The Owl Question: Poems (May Swenson Poetry Award Series) (Hardcover)
Faith Shearin's debut book of poems tells a compelling story. The speaker in these poems begins as a child, becomes a childless wife and ,in a final transformation, finds herself a mother. The book is full of humor and wise observation. She describes her yearning for a child this way: "I hold nothing in my arms. The nothing feels light and heavy at the same time.." The stories these poems weave together are both particular and individual (a mother's untidy kitchen, a father's eccentric love for his dog) and wonderfully universal.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Gorgeous Imagery,
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Owl Question: Poems (Swenson Poetry Award) (Paperback)
Absolutely wonderful book of poetry. She captures sentiment without being sentimental. Even non-readers of poetry will enjoy this.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Inside This Book
(learn more)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
