An Infusion of Violets

Nancy Naomi Carlson

 

6.5 x 9 inches, 80 pp. June 2019

ISBN : 9780857426451

Rs  399.00 (HB)
$15.00 (HB)
£8.00 (HB)

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Using the same musical sense of language she applies to her translations, Nancy Naomi Carlson masterfully interprets herself in An Infusion of Violets. The sometimes erotic, sometimes melancholy landscapes she creates as the self-appointed sitar’s 'ragged throat, pitched / between here and when, / caught in quartertones,' take our breath away. Carlson describes an interior world where tears can produce 'so much salt a body floats away', where 'music tuned to loss descends with rain', and where hope is placed in the 'kill-cure'. Here we encounter Carlson’s ex-husbands and luminaries such as Rachmaninoff and Monet, among others. Filled with striking images and sensuous language, An Infusion of Violets is an evocative mix of formal and free-verse poems.

 

Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator and editor based in Virginia. Her first collection of poetry, Kings Highway, was a co-winner for the Washington Writers' Publishing House competition. Complications of the Heart won the Texas Review Press' Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize and Imperfect Seal of Lips was selected for the Tennessee Chapbook Prize. Featured on Poetry Daily, her work has also appeared in Poet Lore, Poetry, Praire Schooner, Shenandoah, Southern Humanities Review, Southern Poetry Review, Texas Review, among others. For Seagull Books, she has translated Abourahman A. Waberi and Suzanne Dracius.  

 

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