No competing titles. Galleys will be sent to reviewers in March. Postcards will be distributed to bookstores, universities, and literary centers. Brochures detailing author and title information will be sent to reviewers and targeted individuals. Haskins will be reading at venues across the US in the summer and fall.
Lola Haskins has published six full-length poetry collections, most recently The Rim Benders (Anhinga Press). Her other works include Extranjera, (Story Line), Hunger (Story Line), Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano (University Press of Florida) and Castings (Countryman Press). Among her awards are the Iowa Poetry Prize from the University of Iowa Press (for Hunger), the Writer Magazine/Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, and two NEA fellowships, including a fellowship in 2003. Haskins teaches in the computer science department at the University of Florida.
Women of the last five centuries, many from the American South, haunt this collection, which consists of work selected from Haskins's previous five collections along with 23 new poems: "Sometimes my feet carry me/ where Jane wanted to go, where Ann dreamed in her tower./ I am Ellen out of her country." The female personae, gathered together from across time, appear and reappear, engaged in "women's work": piano playing, trading alongside a husband in the frontier, teaching English to Native Americans, embroidering, caring for children, mourning silently the loss of children, dreading the prospect of a barren womb. (One would be hard-pressed to deduce from this collection that Haskins spends her days as a computer science professor at the University of Florida.) Regardless of era, all her personae speak in one spare, humble, resonant poetic voice as if one woman were tracing past lives or as if all women's lives are to be seen as part of a greater experience, which forces the reader to see each persona not as a figure from history but as a kind of contemporary. The poems that deviate from the women's voices lose force; the central section of the book, taken from "Forty-Four Ambitions for the Piano" is frustrating, as if Haskins simply set out to extend a metaphor from every conceivable piano-related term and action. But fans of Sharon Olds or Sharon Kraus will find Haskins's diachronic constellation of women's lives familiar and welcoming: "Loving a son/ hurts, like the stars/ that are always there,/ even in the day sky as if,/ looking up, I could see them past your lifetime and mine." (Aug.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
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