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About the Author
Larissa Szporluk is the author of six books of poetry, including Dark Sky Question, (Barnard Prize), Isolato (Iowa Book Prize), and Virginals, (Burnside Review Press Prize). She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts grant, and received graduate degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Virginia. A former professor of poetry and ongoing mother of three, she now farms in northern Italy.
Advanced Praise
“In a world at war over fossilized myths, nothing is more urgent than that our myths be rewritten. Larissa Szporluk’s Embryos and Idiots revitalizes the myth of the fall, fulfilling the lineage of Genesis and Paradise Lost. Her Anoton continues the contemporary lyric legacy of Ted Hughes’s Crow, her gardens of Od that of Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris. More personal than poems that proclaim themselves so, Szporluk’s mythic lyrics also make themselves more public than most poems manage, calling down “Shame on the zealous / and jealous. Shame on the half-fish god / who dined on himself and survived.” —H. L. Hix
“The richness of language in this collection cannot be overstated-Szporluk loves to rake words, to break rocks, to turn the earth in each poem by breaking up the musty and the comfortable. In doing this she brings us new worlds, neat and prettily shaped on the page, but also smart, allusive and self referential.” –Cate Whetzel
The summer ’08 edition of the Indiana Review contains an excellent review of Larissa Szporluk’s Embryos & Idiots. Part of Cate Whetzel’s review reads thus:
The richness of language in this collection cannot be overstated—Szporluk loves to rake words, to break rocks, to turn the earth in each poem by breaking up the musty and the comfortable. In doing this she brings us new worlds, neat and prettily shaped on the page, but also smart, allusive and self referential.
The story of Anoton [which begins the book] vanishes near the end, and the book becomes simply a collection of (striking) lyrics; until then, his legend, such as it is, provides a thread to connect, and an excuse to elaborate on, Szporluk’s supremely quotable conceits, her images and aphorisms about creation myths and procreation, babies and language, planets and bodies and love, in which “The newborn’s a reborn; every // beloved is the same.” —Publishers’ Weekly
Format: Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-52-1