
Status Pending
Allison Blevins(Author)
Four Way Books (Publisher)
Published on 15. September 2023
Book
Paperback/Softback
120 pages
978-1-954245-72-3 (ISBN)
Description
A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins' oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience. These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states. Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict. If marriage "was a rope across a twilight abyss (an abscess)," if aging brings the hateful labels "OUT OF ORDER / & LATE FEE," every disappointment uncovers rejuvenating clarity. "Bereavement status" engenders both heartbreak and hope, somehow, as "then you lose your losses." Blevins triumphs in her reclamation of the spectacular in the mundane. "America is a flub. // A hack. A crime! America, fuck you for making // despondent bandits of us -- / for blinding & hooding // & chaining & gagging us." Even perched on shifting tectonic plates, Blevins wins the last word: "You don't seem to know it, // but there are foxes / crossing meadows // out there fast as disco lights. There are loons on your lakes." Amen.
More details
Language
English
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 224 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 8 mm
Weight
318 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-954245-72-3 (9781954245723)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Person
Adrian Blevins is the author of three previous full-length collections of poetry--Appalachians Run Amok, Live from the Homesick Jamboree, and The Brass Girl Brouhaha--and, with co-editor Karen Salyer McElmurray, Walk Till the Dogs Get Mean, a collection of essays by new and emerging Appalachian writers. She is the recipient of many awards and honors including the Wilder Prize from Two Sylvias Press, a Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Rona Jaffe Writer's Foundation Award. She is a professor of English at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, where she directs the Creative Writing Program.