This Sharpening

$19.95

by Ellen Doré Watson

This Sharpening is Ellen Doré Watson’s third collection of poetry, and in it she confirms her reputation as one of the most important and discerning, take-no-prisoners voices in American poetry. Watson navigates the fierce terrain of marriage, divorce, love and longing. In these pages the pain of loss contrasts with the pleasures of motherhood when a long marriage ends. Whether indulging fantasies of revenge, reveling in a child’s kisses, or deconstructing a first date in 25 years, Watson is utterly compelling. Watch closely as she balances edgy tempos and sassy rhythms in poems as likely to address a rat on the path as to celebrate a peach or meditate on a truckload of guns. These poems map with unflinching attention the unraveling of a marriage and the persistence of longing, but also chronicle the quotidian joys of the mothering life and the scissor grip on reality it demands, the balance it can restore.

by Ellen Doré Watson

This Sharpening is Ellen Doré Watson’s third collection of poetry, and in it she confirms her reputation as one of the most important and discerning, take-no-prisoners voices in American poetry. Watson navigates the fierce terrain of marriage, divorce, love and longing. In these pages the pain of loss contrasts with the pleasures of motherhood when a long marriage ends. Whether indulging fantasies of revenge, reveling in a child’s kisses, or deconstructing a first date in 25 years, Watson is utterly compelling. Watch closely as she balances edgy tempos and sassy rhythms in poems as likely to address a rat on the path as to celebrate a peach or meditate on a truckload of guns. These poems map with unflinching attention the unraveling of a marriage and the persistence of longing, but also chronicle the quotidian joys of the mothering life and the scissor grip on reality it demands, the balance it can restore.

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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:

“This Sharpening, [is] a volume of agony, doubt, and loss, as Watson explicates the drastic dissolution of her marriage. The sturdy sensuality and the adored daughter were somehow not enough to make a fairy tale endure. Yet the poet’s grief becomes another blade that again sharpens the choice of words and narratives. What emerges from this collection is a leaner, tighter writing self that shivers with wounded fragility, yet moves forward into the stripped beauty of midlife and hard-gained wisdom.”

“Parallels? I pulled out Ruth Stone from the shelf — especially her In the Next Galaxy — and also found similar intensity (yet controlled so that the line has meaning, the image has dimension) in Edward Hirsch.

“With all this, it’s no wonder that Library Journal named Ellen Doré Watson one of its ‘24 poets for the 21st century.’” —Beth Kannell, Kingdom Books, VT

“Ellen Watson is an eloquent, passionate poet; tender, wildly inventive, with the wonder of childhood and a grown woman’s comic sense. Watson’s poetry is the real thing.” — Robert Pinsky

New England Watershed’s Winter 2006-2007 issue contains a review of This Sharpening. In it, Jeanne Brahamshe says: “Lyrical, sometimes confessional, sometimes confrontational, her [Watson’s] poems go where you don’t expect them to go, where you yourself would never dream of going. Blazing honesty in the poet can invite blazing honesty in a reader, especially when that honesty is leavened with insight and humor.”

“Watson’s fiery third effort offers a rare combination: the propulsive rawness of performance poetry and the pathos of impending middle age. These insistent, not-quite-narrative poems describe the daughter she loves, the husband she leaves and the dangerous world through which she moves….” —Publisher’s Weekly

The full review is available at Publishersweekly.com.

Format: paperback
ISBN: 978-1-932195-43-9