Flowers as Mind Control cover image

Flowers as Mind Control

$15.95

Poems
Laura Minor
74 pages
December 2021
978-1-943491-30-8 (paper)

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This book, which was selected by poet John Hodgen for the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, ranges across rural Florida and Georgia as well as Los Angeles and New York City, include considerations of homesickness, memory, music, alcohol, love, and loss. With a voice at once inquisitive and prescient, Minor meditates on consumption, vice, homesickness, memory, family, and the landscape. Minor’s writing is unerringly lyric and blooming with elegant charm and keen description. This book is an alchemy of fortitude in the face of despair and all the transformative possibility that comes with the hope for a better future.

Laura Minor won the Rita Dove Poetry Award (chosen by Marilyn Nelson), the Sassaman Graduate Creative Writing Award, the International Literary Award, and the Emerging Writers Spotlight Award, chosen by poet D.A. Powell. She was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. She was named one of the “10 Acclaimed FSU English Professors That Will Inspire You” by collegemagazine.com. Her poetry is forthcoming or has most recently appeared in Ploughshares, North American Review, The Missouri Review, The Normal School, South Carolina Review, Quiddity International Literary Journal, Arc Poetry Magazine, and the 2021 New Rivers Press anthology, Wild Gods: The Ecstatic In Contemporary Poetry and Prose. She was a Teachers College Fellow at Columbia University and was chosen by Denise Duhamel for a Sarah Lawrence Poetry Award. She holds a PhD from Florida State University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence. She currently lives near the Appalachian Trail.

“This is the magnificent story of ruining things, weeping bottles, flying tuna-fish sandwiches,” writes Minor in her panoramic debut that explores setting (mostly Florida), relationships with men and women, illness, friendship, depression, and suicidal ideation. Its dedication “to women everywhere who refuse to give up their dreams” signals the collection’s interest in resilience. Readers will enjoy Minor’s fierce, unabashed voice.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Flowers as Mind Control is a lyrically compelling collection of poetry written by Laura Minor, the winner of the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, selected by John Hodgen. Minor’s debut collection is a truly original compilation of loneliness and wanderlust with meditations ranging from music and alcohol to homesickness and loss.”
—Jessica Blandford, Southern Review of Books, March 2022

“One of the greatest pleasures I take in poetry is that feeling of camaraderie: the shared space of mutual humanity. That sense of belonging in the world, even with all its volatilities and uncertainties. And Laura Minor’s poems deliver on that pleasure. Achingly real and ever aspiring, this book is full of wonder, full of longing and its rewards. ‘I guess I just wanted to see snow falliing from the sky,’ she writes and ‘I will open a small sea for you.’ I find these poems so gratifying, so necessary. Tender and awake to what’s possible.”
—D.A. Powell author of Useless Landscape, or a Guide for Boys

“There had been Empire. There had been metamorphosis. Now, after that love and that music and that dream of Rome, the poet must come to terms with being human, must accept being one thing instead of many, exiled by Time back to the finality of the body. This is Flowers as Mind Control. Like her co-pilot, the Ovid of the Black Sea Letters, Laura Minor comes off like a fallen god, stranded on barbarian ramparts, piecing together the new real.”
—Josh Bell, author of Alamo Theory

Distributed for BkMk Press.