This book-length poem by the current Poet Laureate of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, Andrea Scarpino, asks the reader to sit with and inside the body's many losses, to grow comfortable and restless in its vagaries, and to acknowledge the myriad ways the body shapes and informs our lives. Incorporating found poetry, including from her own medical records, and the ash and willow tree as mythological figures, Scarpino writes with lyric intensity from a place of resistance and questioning as she tries to describe, understand, and record chronic pain as a growing epidemic.

What the Willow Said as It Fell

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Scarpino, Andrea

Diseases & Physical Ailments

Red Hen Press

In her debut full-length poetry collection, Andrea Scarpino’s elegies move between personal and political loss, between science, myth, and spirituality, and between lyric intensity and narrative clarity. At their heart is a longing for those we have lost, and an acknowledgement that loss irrevocably changes us and what we understand of the world. Blending mythological figures such as Persephone and Achilles, scientific approaches to knowledge learned from her microbiologist father, and a deep ambivalence regarding religious ideas of death and afterlife, Scarpino’s poems invite us to examine the world, our own place in it, and what to make of its continual collapse.

Once, Then

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

Nine Mile Magazine Fall 2002

Herz, Bob

Kuusisto, Steve

Independently published

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Books by Scarpino, Andrea