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Invocation
to Hatty
Beatrice
Dreams
The Tenth Muse
(page 1, page
2)
Read
an interview with the author
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Waking
Stone
Inventions on the Life of Harriet Hosmer
Poems by Carole Simmons Oles
An
intimate dialogue between poet and sculptor
From Carole
Simmons Oles comes a new modern poetry biography, this one
based on the life of American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908).
After an exceptional apprenticeship in Rome, Hosmer opened
a studio there where she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Henry James, and the Brownings. Though some of her work survives
today, much of it has disappeared.
Oles rediscovers
Hosmer’s life in Waking Stone. This is a dialogue,
an exploration of what Oles calls their “parallel universes.”
In beautiful and affecting lyric and narrative poems, some
in Hosmer’s voice, some in her own, Oles bends time
and circumstances to reveal the essential kinship between
two women artists. Oles keeps readers moving through Hosmer’s
story, with its flashes of delight, anger, mischief, and triumph,
as well as through Oles’s life and time, speaking imaginatively
to young women about cutting themselves with razor blades,
and to older women about suffering disfiguring treatments
for breast cancer.
“How
often is a book of poems simultaneously inspiring, informative,
fun, solid as marble, sensuous as flesh, tough-minded and
downright beautiful? Waking Stone is all those things. . .
. When I started, I couldn’t stop—the force of
these poems blew me away.”
—Alicia
Ostriker, author of No Heaven
“In
this astounding and flawlessly structured book Oles has entered
into a passionate dialogue with . . . Hosmer.”
—Richard
Jackson, author of Unauthorized Autobiography: New and
Selected Poems
“Oles
has deftly, clearly, resolutely brought to light the story
of this 19th century woman artist.”
—Rosanna Warren, author of Departure: Poems
Carole Simmons Oles
is a professor of English at California State University at
Chico. She is the author of a number of books, including Night
Watches: Inventions on the Life of Maria Mitchell, Stunts,
and Sympathetic Systems. Among her honors are
a Poetry Society of America Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and four
Prairie Schooner Awards.
October
2006
5 1/2 x 8 1/2 100 pages
$16.00 paper
1-55728-825-9 (978-1-55728-825-7)
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