"Already the Heart"
from A. V. Christie's
The Housing
from A. V. Christie's
The Housing
A. V. Christie:
A. V. Christie, co-winner of the 2004 Robert McGovern Publication Prize, is also the winner of the 1996 National Poetry Series for her book Nine Skies. Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Poetry, Ploughshares, Passages North, Shenandoah, Boulevard, The Iowa Review, Seneca Review, The American Scholar, Image, and Verse, among other magazines. She has taught for over ten years as a Poet-in-the-Schools.
A graduate of Vassar College and The University of Maryland, she has won Individual Artist Fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts and from The Maryland and Pennsylvania State Arts Councils as well as from the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.
She lives with her family in Malvern, Pennsylvania, where she has been most recently the Writer-in-Residence at LaSalle University and at Penn State Abington. (Photo by Robin Hiteshew)
About The Housing:
"In A.V. Christie's highly cadenced, diamond-faceted, elliptical poems – emotion intensified to a white heat by its own refinement – to be spare is, equally, to be spared. Here is the hard-pressed attar of awareness, a distillation of the essential from the usual: 'And the garden this time is not about abundance, but the necessary.'"
— Eleanor Wilner
"At a certain point in life we might hear the 'whir' of desire, like 'the constant thrum of the house' or 'the coursing of blood' – a sound that undermines everything, especially our faith in what we thought we knew. This is the moment from which A.V. Christie's powerful and unsettling new collection, The Housing, embarks. Get ready for the journey. She offers no 'full-moon remedies' but rather the heart's 'torments' and its saving 'adventures.'"
— Michael Collier
"In beautiful and mysterious poems, many-layered and intricate like the anatomical drawings of Vesalius, A.V. Christie creates the housing for a metaphysical realm pulled back from some far-off dream. But looking closely, we can see it's our familiar world, exquisitely delineated: the shelter of marriage, family, dwelling, not to forget the body, our first and primary housing."
— Elaine Terranova
by A. V. Christie
The Ashland Poetry Press
Ashland University
Ashland, Ohio
Poetry Daily / Amazon.com
Selected books available by A. V. Christie:The Housing — Paperback
Nine Skies — Paperback
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