"Sunday Morning"
from Ellen Doré Watson's
This Sharpening

Ellen Doré Watson:

Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, Ellen Doré Watson is the author of Ladder Music (Alice James Books, 2001) and We Live in Bodies (Alice James Books, 1997), as well as Broken Railings (Green Lake Chapbook Prize, Owl Creek Press, 1996). She is the translator of eleven books from Brazilian Portuguese and serves as Translation Editor of The Massachusetts Review.

Watson's poems have appeared widely in journals, including The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. Among her awards and honors are the Bullis-Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant. Library Journal named her one of "24 Poets for the 21st Century."

About This Sharpening:

This Sharpening is Ellen Doré Watson's fourth collection of poetry, and in it she confirms her reputation as one of the most important and discerning, take-no-prisoners voices in American poetry. Watson navigates the fierce terrain of marriage, divorce, love and longing. In these pages the pain of loss contrasts with the pleasures of motherhood when a long marriage ends. Whether indulging fantasies of revenge, reveling in a child's kisses, or deconstructing a first date in 25 years, Watson is utterly compelling. Watch closely as she balances edgy tempos and sassy rhythms in poems as likely to address a rat on the path as to celebrate a peach or meditate on a truckload of guns. These poems map with unflinching attention the unraveling of a marriage and the persistence of longing, but also chronicle the quotidian joys of the mothering life and the scissor grip on reality it demands, the balance it can restore.

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