New Dominion Bookshop will host a reading and book-signing
by Ted Genoways, who will present selections from his book of poems,
Anna, Washing
Thursday, September 25, 2008 at 5:30 PM
Set against the bleak backdrop of the Yukon and the historical moment of the 1897 Klondike gold rush, this chronologically arranged series of sonnets is grounded in the lived experience of Finnish immigrants Anna and Abe Malm. Anna hauls her Anthony Wayne Washer into the wilderness and sets up a laundry business while Abe seeks his fortune. Anna and Abe share a unique history, revealed in the book’s epigraph: Anna, nineteen years her husband’s senior, had first raised him and then married him.
Genoways’s graceful formalism makes percussive music of a story marked by isolation and brutal difficulty. He manages a deft and plain-speaking rhyme that is in keeping with the tough lives his poems explore. The poems, which shift in frame from Anna’s letters or Abe’s diary to third-person verse that captures the characters’ inner thoughts, bring the vitality of luminous detail and psychological depth to the arc of history.
“While in conversation with excellent books that have come before it — Rita Dove’s Thomas and Beulah, Ellen Voigt’s Kyrie, and A. Van Jordan’s Macnolia, for example — its framework, balance of thematic material, scaffolding of form, and elegantly shifting perspectives make it wholly original. Quite simply, a beautiful book.”
—Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Native Guard
Ted Genoways is the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. He is a 1994 graduate of Nebraska Wesleyan, holds an MA in poetry from Texas Tech, where he taught creative writing, and the MFA from the University of Virginia (1999). Genoways is the author of Bullroarer (Northeastern, 2001), winner of the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize, the Natalie Ornish Poetry Award, and the Nebraska Book Award. His other awards include a Pushcart Prize, a 2003 NEA Fellowship in Poetry, and two Guy Owen Poetry Prizes from Southern Poetry Review. He is the editor of numerous books, including The Selected Poems of Miguel Hernández (Chicago, 2001) and The Collected Writings of Walt Whitman: The Correspondence, Volume VII (Iowa, 2004).
Filed under: authors, books, charlottesville, reading, virginia Tagged: | Anna Washing, poetry, Ted Genoways
