About

Red Silk by Missouri Poet Laureate Maryfrances Wagner is now back in print. Winner of the Thorpe Menn Award, Red Silk’s subjects draw upon her Italian-American immigrant family, personal reverberations of the Vietnam War, and coming of age in the Midwest.

Author

Maryfrances Wagner’s books include Salvatore’s Daughter, Light Subtracts Itself, Dioramas, Pouf, The Silence of Red Glass, and The Immigrants’ New Camera. Poems have appeared in New Letters, Midwest Quarterly, Laurel Review, Rattle, River Styx, Main Street Rag, Green Mountains Review, Tar River Review, Voices in Italian Americana, Unsettling America: An Anthology of Contemporary Multicultural Poetry (Penguin Books), Literature Across Cultures (Pearson/Longman), Bearing Witness, The Dream Book, An Anthology of Writings by Italian American Women (American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation), etc. She co-edits I-70 Review and served as individual artist honoree for the Missouri Arts Awards, the state’s highest honor in the arts. She serves as Missouri’s poet laureate for 2021-2023.

Praise

“I have admired the work of Maryfrances Wagner for more than twenty years as have legions of her students and readers. Now the publication of Red Silk is cause for our celebration, for here are the best of her new poems, arranged as both a personal memoir and a cultural history of America’s past four decades. Each section of this powerful book becomes its own narrative episode—from the ravages of the Vietnam War, which tore our bodies and marriages and national integrity, to the poet’s battle with ill health, to her loving acceptances of middle age in middle America. And throughout the poems waves the figure of red silk. Is it a bloodied bandage? A piece of lover’s clothing? A flag? A teacher’s corrective? It is all of these and more. If her poems are plainspoken, woven into tight lines, Wagner’s book accumulates into an inclusive, sympathetic document of post-nuclear American life, as delicate and as fiery as red silk itself. In the end, Maryfrances Wagner knows the hardest knowledge: that the personal is the political, as the erotic is the elegiac.”
—David Baker, Kenyon Review

“So many objects that Maryfrances Wagner gathers here—their sad-happy-lost-and-found associations and truly-felt texture—will help reassure us, I think, that living, that simply getting from here to there, is always worth it, finally, even though sometimes, especially when the heart is most tired, we just don’t see how. Red Silk is a book that sees how.”
—Gary Gildner, author of The Bunker in the Parsley Fields, Cleaning a Rainbow