Two Poems:
"Broken Sleep"
"The Visionary under the Knife"
from Madeline DeFrees's
Spectral Waves

Madeline DeFrees:

Spectral Waves is Madeline DeFrees's eighth full-length collection. Her Blue Dusk: New & Selected Poems, 1951-2001 (Copper Canyon Press, 2001) won the Academy of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize and the Washington State Book Award. She has also published short stories, essays, journalism feature stories, and two poetry chapbooks, as well as two memoirs of her nearly thirty-eight years as a nun.

DeFrees's work has been recognized by a Guggenheim Poetry Fellowship, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, and the Denise Levertov Award from Image: A Journal of the Arts & Religion and the Department of English of Seattle Pacific University.

DeFrees has taught at Holy Names College (renamed Fort Wright College), Spokane; the University of Montana, Missoula; and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She lives in Seattle and teaches in the Pacific University Low-residency M.F.A. Program. (Photo by Keith Funai)

About Spectral Waves:

Madeline DeFrees is an unconventional and technically brilliant writer whose new poems range in scope and scale from sonnets about Elvis to lyrics about optical cataracts, birds, and the creatures in her well-tended garden. In this follow-up to her Lenore Marshall Award-winning Blue Dusk, she directly engages the work of Keats, Frost, Merwin, and others in her conversational debates that demonstrate the confidence and familiarity of a poet who has spent five decades practicing her craft. The variety in Spectral Waves speaks to DeFrees's enthusiasm for art, nature, and what she calls "word worlds" — the esoteric jargon she makes her own in order to expand upon human experience. As the judges for the Washington State Book Award declared, Madeline DeFrees is "far from finished teaching us how to listen and to see."

Praise for Madeline DeFrees's Poetry

"DeFrees is committed to rigorous, even ritualistic, forms and a dense economy and precision of language."
— Poetry

"These poems are history lessons from no book of history we've been forced to read. They are the best criticism for poets and readers — an absorption of prosody adapted, of poetic ancestry and kinship, sometimes adoration, but offered slant, bravely spoken and sung."
— The Nation

"Like Dickinson, like the saints whose lives were divine energy, DeFrees is acutely aware of her mortality, but what we experience above all here is a fierce celebration of life in all its difficulty."
— Prairie Schooner

"Her poetry reflects her past, but moves beyond it to create a lasting statement about women and the mysteries of faith."
— The Bloomsbury Review

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