"Coyotes in Greenwich!"
from Julie Sheehan's
Orient Point

Julie Sheehan:

Julie Sheehan's first collection of poems was Thaw. In addition to the Barnard Women Poets Prize, Sheehan has won the Paris Review Bernard F. Conners Prize for Poetry and the Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Memorial Award. She lives on Long Island, New York, where she teaches writing. (Photo by Miles Thorsen)

About Orient Point:

Nests woven of bird guides and self-help books, legal argot and street slang, Whitman's long-lined grass, and the sway, jangle, juxtaposition, joy, and far-flung syntax of the vast field of English going back to its gnarly old roots in Chaucer – all populate Julie Sheehan's exuberant poems. Sheehan's poems are concerned with navigation and with choice; with how to live in an increasingly urbanized, global, technological world; with how to orient oneself as, for example, a woman in a still largely patriarchal society; and with how to make moral choices when the options seem either rich to embarrassment or shamefully narrow. In Sheehan's world, hip-hop reverberates throughout Southern swamps and "men / have left their honeysuckle sows for yields / of telemarketing." Yet there are coyotes in Greenwich, Connecticut, where "our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain, / our nature disobediently tends toward nature." Orient Point seeks balance between the boundless joy and the tragic irony of today's existence, asking essentially, Do we make our way through abundance or debris?

"Julie Sheehan possesses a range of tones – tender, sassy, quietly observant, deeply cutting – that will keep this book's readers pleasantly off balance. She also has a true poet's ear, alert to the texture of every syllable. Orient Point delivers the goods, a collection bursting with verbal and existential exuberance."
— Billy Collins

"I was struck by the muscle, size shadows, and nuance of her work."
— Linda Gregg, Barnard Women Poets Prize Citation

"In this fine book Julie Sheehan's wit, imaginative power, splendidly controlled diction, and sense of pace are apparent in the way in which she can engage matters of deep feeling with a comic exuberance that can beautifully modulate in the course of a poem's unfolding. 'Ghazal: Orient Point,' and the longer 'Archaic Smile,' exemplify in particular both the energies of her language and the range of knowledge she brings to the construction of a poetic world."
— John Hollander

"Julie Sheehan, dance of language, plucks ripe vocabulary from the air as she leaps across her poems with a grand elasticity of imagination that stretches surprise as if it was a forgotten muscle, twists with vital delight, and always astonishes."
— Molly Peacock

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