Bloom in Reverse
Published on 27. January 2014
103 pages
978-0-8229-7964-7 (ISBN)
Description
Bloom in Reverse chronicles the aftermath of a friend's suicide and the end of a turbulent relationship, working through devastation and loss while on a search for solace that spans from local bars to online dating and beyond to ultimately find true connection and sustaining love. Things move backwards, from death to life, like a reverse time-lapse video of a dead flower morphing from brittle, scorched entity to floral glory to nacsent bud. The poems seek to find those places where the natural world connects to and informs experiences at the core of human relationships, and at times call upon principles and theories from physics and mathematics to describe the complexities of love and loss. It's a book where grief, melancholy, heartbreak, and disillusionment intersect with urban romanticism, hope, possibility, and love. Bloom is all of it, the terrible and the beautiful.
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Teresa Leo
Bloom in Reverse
Book
01/2014
University of Pittsburgh Press
€19.00
Shipment within 10-20 days
Person
Teresa Leo is the author of the poetry collection The Halo Rule, which won the Elixir Press Editors' Prize. She is the recipient of a Pew fellowship, a Leeway Foundation grant, two Pennsylvania Council on the Arts fellowships, and the Richard Peterson Poetry Prize from Crab Orchard Review. Her poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She serves on the board of Musehouse, a center for the literary arts in Philadelphia, and works at the University of Pennsylvania.
Content
- Intro
- Contents
- I. No
- Confession
- The Fifth Vital Sign
- Suicide Is a Mind Stripping Petals off Flowers
- "Eating Is an Act of Optimism"
- She Said: It's Not That Things Bring Us to Tears, but Rather, There Are Tears in Things
- Memory Is a Kind of Broken Promise
- Bronze
- Poem for a Troubled Room
- Fly Haiku
- Virginia Farm Haunting
- Metempsychosis
- I Have Drinks with My Dead Friend's Ex-Boyfriend
- After Twelve Months, Someone Tells Me It's Time to Join the Living
- II. Wolves in Shells
- Into the Salvage Yard
- Home Is a Four-Letter Word
- Golden Ratio
- Mausoleum of the Unfixable
- Split Screen
- Constant
- Your Rose Bush
- Last Call Sestina
- Transemotional
- Daylilies
- III. Hidden Wings
- Miniature
- Chaos Theory
- My Friend Asks What I've Been Doing Lately, and by This She Means Men
- Poem Ending with Six Words from a Women's Room Stall
- Mechanical Reproduction
- Online Dating
- Earth, Hair, Fire, Water
- New York City
- The Heart Has the Capacity to Break and Reset a Million Times
- IV. Passenger
- Elegy, Two Years Later
- The Exactness of Birds
- Ex as CSI Episode
- Nine Man
- And Then You
- The Last Good Man
- Hooke's Law
- Force
- Love as the Circle-to-Land Approach
- Horseshoe Crabs
- Advice for a Dying Fern
- Acknowledgments
