Another Creature
Poems by Pamela Gemin
978-1-55728-928-5 (paper)
April 2010
$19.95
About
Finalist, Miller Williams Poetry Prize
In Another Creature Pamela Gemin reconciles her generation’s impulse toward personal freedom with its costs as she moves her cast of innocents and outlaws through Midwestern landscapes embroidered with green lawns, blue lakes and raspberry patches eerily wired for sound. Hers are hungry poems, in and of the world, expounding the “flavors and hues, the fragrance and skin / of the merchandise of Earth.”
Author
Pamela Gemin teaches at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and is author of the poetry collection, Vendettas, Charms, and Prayers. She is also the editor of three poetry anthologies including Sweeping Beauty: Women Poets Do Housework. Her poems and anthologies have been featured on NPR’s Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Writer’s Almanac.
Praise
“In her quietly ferocious poems, Gemin reminds us again and again of the essential strangeness that lies within the domestic. Her examinations of the quotidian always lead to surprising and pathos-laden reckonings—with the self, with the past, and with the manifold contradictions and menace that exist within contemporary culture.”
—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace
“Passion, hard drinking, bad-boy lovers, life lived on the brink of a dare—all this flares like embers un-banked and newly fed as the speaker of these poems, a woman who ‘hangs lace in her kitchen windows’ and has reached a safer, more sedate middle-age, calls her past back into being. Another Creature reminds us that we can remain, under the surface, the wild, hopeful, headstrong ‘creatures’ of our youth.”
—Leslie Ullman, author of Slow Work Through Sand
“What verve and gumption, what generosity in these poems! . . . Gemin’s voice is bold and nuanced, her art supple and sure. She moves with utter grace through the sound track of adolescence into the music of midlife with its subtle complications, and she gives us a beatific vision of ourselves. Gemin is a gem of a poet and this book is a true gift.”
—Betsy Sholl, author of Rough Cradle