Purr

$14.00 paper | 73 Pages
ISBN-13: 978-1-930974-45-6
Publication Date: February 2005
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The Green Rose Series
An Inland Seas Poetry Book

“The texture and shape of the world, described so vividly as to bring eyesight to the blind. And the Eliotesque mutterings, the stage whispers, the blips of the overheard and the internal musings of the mind. Here is a poetry built of sensory data so sharply honed as to make even the mundane microfibre or the quotidian stone path a journey, a finding, a deep understanding of the world. And who couldn’t love a book where Doris Day and Nancy Sinatra are as essential and as mysterious as saints?”
—D.A. Powell

“If you lower the volume on the usual poetry noises and tune your intelligence to the exquisite frequencies of Mary Ann Samyn’s third book, Purr, you will hear the contemporary. ‘Then language finished, and set me down. / I had been performed. I had been emptied,’ she writes and, as is so often the case in this dazzling collection, the poetry hovers between irony and true despair. Nuance and variety infuses these pages. This is poetry that is hip, elegant, sorrowful, witty, and new. Don’t read it at your peril.”
—Lynn Emanuel

“Her sense of humor is evident throughout and instead of making fun of or mocking an intent, it serves to accentuate the difficulty of trying to express/communicate/illuminate anything through language.”
—Anna Eyre, Traffic

Mary Ann Samyn

Mary Ann Samyn is the author of four books of poetry, most recentlyPurr (New Issues, 2005). Her work has won the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the James Wright Poetry Award from Mid-American Review, and a Pushcart Prize. She teaches in the MFA program at West Virginia University.