Dogged Hearts

$19.95

by Ellen Doré Watson

In her fifth collection of poems, Ellen Doré Watson lends her supple voice to a multiplicity of characters, each with his or her own particular dilemma, distraction, or disarray: Junie biking home to find a new mom, Edur wondering whether he’s anyone’s father, a pregnant teen starving herself to lose the fetus, or the widower Lew buoyed by a vision of his wife after her death. With a novelist’s finesse and a poet’s details, Watson creates lives that resonate with poignancy and urgency.

In Dogged Hearts Ellen Doré Watson demonstrates a capacious talent for invention and empathy and, with her incomparable linguistic brio, gives us an unforgettable look at how loss and disconnection can usher in chance-to-change reverie and unexpected veerings towards life.

by Ellen Doré Watson

In her fifth collection of poems, Ellen Doré Watson lends her supple voice to a multiplicity of characters, each with his or her own particular dilemma, distraction, or disarray: Junie biking home to find a new mom, Edur wondering whether he’s anyone’s father, a pregnant teen starving herself to lose the fetus, or the widower Lew buoyed by a vision of his wife after her death. With a novelist’s finesse and a poet’s details, Watson creates lives that resonate with poignancy and urgency.

In Dogged Hearts Ellen Doré Watson demonstrates a capacious talent for invention and empathy and, with her incomparable linguistic brio, gives us an unforgettable look at how loss and disconnection can usher in chance-to-change reverie and unexpected veerings towards life.

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About the Author

Ellen Doré Watson was hailed by Library Journal as one of “24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Her collections of poetry include Ladder Music and We Live in Bodies (Alice James, 2001 and 2002), This Sharpening (Tupelo, 2006), and most recently Dogged Hearts (book and audio book: Tupelo, 2010). She has also translated a dozen books, including The Alphabet in the Park: Selected Poems of Adélia Prado (Wesleyan University Press, 1990) and works by Brazilian poet Ignácio de Loyola Brandão as well as contemporary Arabic poetry (co-translated with Saadi Simawe). She is the Poetry and Translation Editor for The Massachusetts Review and the director of The Poetry Center at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Watson’s poems have appeared widely in journals, including The American Poetry Review and The New Yorker. Among her awards and honors are the Bullis-Kizer Prize from Poetry Northwest, a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and a 1990 Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Grant.

In 2011, she was appointed an Elector of the Poets’ Corner at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine.

Advanced Praise

“Watson’s skill here, as on so many pages, is to be accessible and kinetic while seeing something new in a common experience. Her sight is so unique, her inner editor so keen, that she brings a prismatic freshness to what eye and her ‘dogged heart’ confront.” —Barbara Berman, The Rumpus

The poems are wild, delirious—they go every which way—yet the (smart) organizing principle is this mind, ever alert, choosing and sorting, saving and abandoning, given up to passion and knowledge. Dogged Hearts is a powerful and wise book. —Gerald Stern

These intensely lyrical, very physical poems batter their way forward, embodiments of the struggle to keep emotionally alive; Dogged Hearts reminds us why the arts are called the humanities: because they remind us how to be human. —Tony Hoagland

‘…dear rash world so far / outside my window….’ Well, not that far, in these wily, intricate poems, because so many radiant voices live here—old, young, the living, the dead—plus all gorgeous manner of trees and stones and birds. A kind of glad lush chaos hits again and again in this work. —Marianne Boruch

Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-90-3