The Truant Lover
by JULIET PATTERSON
Finalist for the 19th Annual Lambda Literary Awards
Winner of the 2004 NIGHTBOAT POETRY PRIZE
Chosen by National Book Award Winner, Jean ValentineJuliet Patterson incorporates the voices of Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, and Wallace Stevens, drawing into her stunning debut a fascination with the difficult, the improbable, and the uneasy. There is a quiet ferocity to mourn the world's injustice and a passion in her work expressing the perplexities of love, grace, and consciousness. For all their easy fluency of detail and lyrical meticulousness, they are poems not intended for the faint-hearted; they are tough and unsparing, offering for our consolation only their scrupulous precision. ISBN 0-9767185-2-9
74 pages
$14.95 paperback
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Click below to read poems from The Truant Lover
"Ode"
"Index of First Lines"
Praise for JULIET PATTERSON
Juliet Patterson's poems are entirely themselves; they use time and the eye and tongue—all the body, as thought and insight, inside and outside history. The Truant Lover is a marvel.
—Jean Valentine
Spare, pastoral, intimate, and probing, these musically exacting poems offer arresting insights: "Here's a world for today: // killing & not dying / fantastically, not lying." They question, invent, refer, divert, take flying risks. They are fluid, considered, dignified. They celebrate the human eye, mind, and tongue. It is a joy to have them in print.
—Olga Broumas
Anyone can use the fragment, but only a few know how to make it do what it's supposed to—pierce the heart. And once inside the heart, Juliet Patterson can go anywhere & everywhere, & does. Where she comes from is as close as you will ever get to that midnight trembling inside the sweet whiplash of a tongue. This is poetry you can pick a lock with. Your lock. Terrific.
—David Rivard
In the 31 poems of Patterson's debut...stories create the experiences they narrate: "As in the parable, the truant lover / arrived." Speaking in a clinical, yet vulnerable voice, Patterson seeks to delineate "I" from "eye": "I in the form of my own urging, eye / in its movement follows the body's future / path." Patterson's style foregrounds the visual...emphasizing the connection of the senses and the arts. Patterson's search for self-knowledge often threatens violence as well: "A book is a huge cemetery." Yet this same force also preserves life: "Members breeding / on poisonous members // store the poisons / for their own defense." Patterson has crafted a far-reaching first book that blends self-interrogation with metaphysical inquiry. Both Patterson and Nightboat show great promise.
—Publisher's Weekly
Juliet Patterson's first collection of poems, The Truant Lover, selected by Jean Valentine, is a pastiche of American voices, a well of poems with passages that hint and nod at past poets while remaining wholly their own. Patterson is a true rock star on the page, with poems ranging from broken syntax to the sparsest phrase to the Queen's English. This is a highly philosophical book, one that does not flinch as it goes to the heart of who we are.
—Square Books
About JULIET PATTERSON
Juliet Patterson lives near the west bank of the Mississippi River in Minneapolis. Her work has appeared in American Letters & Commentary, Bellingham Review, Bloom, Conduit, DIAGRAM, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Journal, New Orleans Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Typo, Washington Square, Verse, and other magazines. She edits poetry for Konundrum Engine Literary Review with Rachel Moritz, and teaches at the College of Saint Catherine and Hamline University. The Truant Lover is her first book. For additional information, please go to www.julietpatterson.com.
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