The Boys I Borrow
$14.00 paper | 97 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-930974-71-5
Publication Date: Nov 2007
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“Many of these sensitive, clever poems are about navigating the new waters of a non traditional family. The result is a cohesive, engaging collection in which a real heroine persona explores the often challenging terrain of the domicile.”
—Billy Collins
“In a world in which people speak in clichés and platitudes, Heather Sellers’s stunning new collection of poems The Boys I Borrow, transcends the quotidian events of our day. I’ve read novels that have not developed relationships between people in marriage as well as this. In poems that deftly insert lyric moments into narrative, she uncovers the nuances of infertility, a new marriage and the changes in life before and after. If you know anything about the difference between desire and love and the realities that blur between them, if you’ve lived any life at all you’ll ‘remember, you have lived this way, always hungry’ for more.”
—A. Van Jordan
“When you open The Boys I Borrow, you won’t find poems about angels or mythological heroines—what you’ll find is life the way we live it, but more clearly seen and deeply understood than the average human can easily bear. The dramas in this book are the dramas of the lived life in the 21st century—we have trips to the fertility doctor, motorcycles rides to the Shangrai-La Motel beneath a ‘well hung, low slung’ moon, stepsons whose ‘tongues are simple antennae’ and who play Nintendo, need help with their homework—in short, all of our wonderfully banal and beautiful world rendered in painterly precision and tender humor. This is a book that sustains.”
—Beth Ann Fennelly
Heather Sellers
Heather Sellers is the author of two previous volumes of poetry, the short story collection Georgia Under Water, a children’s book, and a series of books on the practice of writing. Her memoir about face blindness is forthcoming from Riverhead Books in Fall 2010. Recipient of a National Endowments for the Arts Fellowship for fiction, Heather Sellers is a professor at Hope College in Holland, Michigan.
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