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Blue Rose

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Carol Muske-Dukes

Paperback

$18.00 US

Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books

5.9"W x 9"H x 0.2"D | 4 oz | 32 per carton

On sale Apr 03, 2018 | 80 Pages | 9780143131250

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A new collection of emotionally rich, issue-oriented poems from an award-winning poet whose work “has long been essential reading” (Jorie Graham)

Carol Muske-Dukes has won acclaim for poetry that marries sophisticated intelligence, emotional resonance, and lyrical intensity. The poems in her new collection, Blue Rose, navigate around the idea of the unattainable – the elusive nature of poetry, of knowledge, of the fact that we know so little of the lives of others, of the world in which we live. Some poems respond to matters of women, birth, and the struggle for reproductive rights, or to issues like gun control and climate change, while others draw inspiration from the lives of women who persisted outside of convention, in poetry, art, science: the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker, the scientist and X-ray crystallographer Rosalind Franklin, and the Californian poet and writer Ina Coolbrith, the first poet laureate ever appointed in America.

Carol Muske-Dukes is a professor of English at the University of Southern California. Her 1997 collection of poetry, An Octave Above Thunder, was nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. A poet, critical essayist, and fiction author, she lives in Los Angeles. View titles by Carol Muske-Dukes

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Requiem for a Requiem

— Paula Modersohn-Becker, 1876-1907

Shaking shame from her brush, she presses
it to canvas. Before her, women could not
paint women naked. Before her, women
could not gaze into the mirror of their flesh.

Still lines erasing taboo: spite-green goblet,
halved fruit. The women staring, bare. Or
nursing unclothed, eyes on the artist’s eyes.
Without shame: a style.

She haunts her friend, Rilke, from beyond
the grave she predicted for herself, days past
giving birth. For years: refused that death

warrant. Near the art colony, she reinvents
her solitude. Glass held up to query an angle,
bootlegged light in a doorway. Bootlegged:

a daughter’s open eyes. Clichés of haunt: Paris
ateliers, Cézanne’s oranges, fractured Picasso
nudes. Knowing what they knew. Saw how

style derives from itself: how a body idealized
by desire floats in trees, vanishes in clouds.
Never to laugh, pick up a kid, bleed. She picks

up a kid, bleeds. Leaving Rilke’s portrait un-
done. Drifting now into his “Requiem,”
writ for her: “friend,” this shadow body. He

beckons now into candlelight. She listens
to her own breath, dying. So like each
gasp at the start. Says: Did you know Death

cheers at each conception? as Love looks to her
in the mirror: sweet murder. Chance-
implacable is the enthroned soul, but she rises on

each brushstroke. Deathless, her way
to unveil a woman’s body. But “Schande!” she cries,
her dying word, holding her newborn daughter to her

breast. Shame! Soul, come claim the body.

“Muske-Dukes writes with piercing clarity about both current events and personal struggles . . .the intensity of these poems – which seek to know more about the lives of others and our world – is difficult to forget.” – The Washington Post

“This book is the culmination of a lifetime of poetry writing and acquired wisdom. The poetry is at the highest level but it’s also about daily life: poetry as life story . . . the overriding theme is learning to be who you are in a world of massive possibility.” – Michael Silverblatt, “Bookworm”

"In this collection . . . [women] are rare and mysterious, afflicted and abused, generous and generative, soaring above circumstance. Although this book tells many stories, it belongs to the histories and tumultuous hours of women whose lives we might not even notice otherwise . . . These poems offer us pictures of unsung choices that shape women’s lives." – The Rumpus

“Muske-Dukes’s skill in these poems is her ability to ground her public and private concerns so firmly in compelling images, graceful allusion and lyrical cadence . . . her poems are an active resistance to erasure; they elevate, explore and elegize the experience of women who have already been erased by circumstance, society, and history.” – Lorna Knowles Blake, The Hudson Review

“A kaleidoscopic work, both politically charged and personal. Family events, feminist celebrations and activist struggles have a transcendental element.” – Carol Rumens, The Guardian

“Poems of keen attunement . . . Muske-Dukes wields a finely calibrated matter-of-factness shot through with frissons of wonder as she reports on the shifting elements of dark and light in everyday moments, and tracks the physics of feeling – attraction and repulsion, chaos and sudden, rare, fleeting clarity.” --Donna Seaman, ALA Booklist

“A beautiful book . . . with its theme of life’s fierce tenacity . . . Because of a keen intelligence, [Muske-Dukes’s] portrayals are neither sentimental nor occasions for protest. Instead they are colorful, accurate, and strikingly alive.” –Grace Schulman, New York Journal of Books

“Scathing intelligence and an open heart: the most difficult combination in the world, and bountifully manifest on every page. In the birth room, at the death bed, beneath the falling ash of a California wildfire, before the whole, hurt spectacle of an imperiled and beloved world, these poems remind us what it’s truly like to see and feel. And oh, the achieved musicianship: every image and abutment, every syllable and turn of diction earns its place in the cadence of the whole. These poems arrive like a life line.” --Linda Gregerson

“Much of Muske-Dukes’s verse kneads at the hardships of womanhood . . . nearly every poem heaves with grief or torment or even, at times, profound love.” –Caitlin Youngquist, The Paris Review

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