Missing Her

$15.00 paper | 79 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-930974-86-9
Publication Date: Oct 5, 2009
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The Green Rose Series

In poems performed via scat singing, via documentary, poems devoted to the sui generis, Missing Her redefines the elegy as a seeking statement.

“Keelan’s work, always politically engaged, here takes a tender and personal turn. Much of what is mourned in these interwoven elegies is private, close in, but even the
larger, more public themes—the Vietnam War, Jesus, the oil industry, September 11—are brought to an intimate scale. The central long poem ‘Everybody’s Autobiography’ achieves a masterful fusion of political history, personal responsibility, and communal grief. A deep-feeling collection not afraid to look loss in the face.”
—Cole Swensen

“The striking long poem ‘Everybody’s Autobiography’ recalls Keelan’s own and others’ pasts. Keelan, one of our best, if too little known, experimental poets, does what she can in this sixth collection to steady ‘the human boat’ which ‘Came capsizing…// Came lost.'”
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Claudia Keelan

Claudia Keelan is the author of five previous collections of poetry including Refinery, The Secularist, Utopic, and The Devotion Field. Her awards include the Jerome Shestack Award from the American Poetry Review, the Beatrice Hawley Award from Alice James Books, the Robert D. Richardson Award from theDenver Quarterly and the Silver Pen Award from the State of Nevada. Her poetry has been anthologized in The Body Electric(Norton), American Hybrid(Norton), Lyric Postmodernisms(Counterpath), and The Book of Irish American Poetry (University of Notre Dame Press). She lives in Las Vegas with her husband, the poet Donald Revell, and their children Ben and Lucie.