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The True Account of Myself as a Bird

Part of Penguin Poets

Author Robert Wrigley

Paperback

$18.00 US

Penguin Adult HC/TR | Penguin Books

5.94"W x 8.98"H x 0.33"D | 6 oz | 24 per carton

On sale Jun 14, 2022 | 112 Pages | 9780143137245

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From an award-winning poet, a new collection that endeavors to pass along what the things of the earth are telling us

Over the course of his career Robert Wrigley has won acclaim for the emotional toughness, sonic richness, and lucid style of his poems, and for his ability to fuse narrative and lyrical impulses. In his new collection, Wrigley means to use poetry to capture the primal conversation between human beings and the perilously threatened planet on which they love and live, proceeding from a line from Auden: “All we are not stares back at what we are.” In language that is both elegiac and playful, declarative and yet ringingly musical; in traditional sonnets, quatrains, and free verse, Wrigley transcribes the consciousness and significance of every singing thing—in order to sing back.

Robert Wrigley has won numerous awards for his work, including the Kingsley Tufts Award, the San Francisco Poetry Center Book Award, and a Pacific Northwest Book Award. He lives in the woods of Idaho, with his wife the writer Kim Barnes. The True Account of Myself As a Bird is his twelfth collection of poems. He is also the author of a collection of personal essays, mostly about poetry, called Nemerov’s Door. View titles by Robert Wrigley

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Praise for The True Account of Myself as a Bird:

“Robert Wrigley is as lavish with the music of his syllables as he is with the descriptions they compose of the natural world and where it meets the human one. He considers aging, the chaos of Trump’s America and 'the ever-developing dazzling dust of earth' in these Frostian meditations. In his poems, Wrigley is always friendly and always, even in anger or pain, celebratory.”
—NPR's “Books We Love”

“With poems playful and serious, employing free verse and traditional forms, Robert Wrigley insists across time, distance, and every chasm that we are, somehow, one another. What at this moment could be harder to say? What could ever be truer? And Wrigley means we in that widest, truest sense—butterflies, boulders, the nondescript neighbor also named Bob: all beings here are allowed their worth and meaning and song.”
—Orion Magazine

“Worlds come together in Robert Wrigley’s new collection, The True Account of Myself as a Bird, taking surprising leaps of dare and faith inside every turn, and rituals of becoming traverse borders of mind and flesh, as each word grooves. And it is a felt, lived music that runs a binding seam through human lives so natural and true.”
—Yusef Komunyakaa, author of Night Animals

“An extended epiphanic fireworks show of the ordinary . . . I will be immersed again and again and will get these glimpses of life through Wrigley’s singular attention to surroundings and nature, to memory, to the sweet, comic vagaries of aging, to the things and people he loves, and most of all, to language and to all the meaning and music he pulls from it.”
—Jess Walter

Praise for Robert Wrigley's previous collection, Box:

“Quietly enlightening . . . Box thoughtfully considers how human beings, relationships, and the physical world are constrained by time, mortality, and other invisible forces . . . Wrigley meditates on the fragility and strength of nature; the search for transcendence and connection; the objects people keep and pass on; and how various landscapes can trap or inspire the soul.”
—The Washington Post

“These poems are masterful in how they navigate time, molding memory into new understanding.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch

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