Startling,
Poems by Andrea Selch
The poems of Startling,
Andrea Selch's first full-length collection of poems, do just that:
startle the reader into a new awareness of the passages of life. Weaving a
tapestry that spans from the birth of a child to death from illness, Selch
renders her subjects with both wit and wonder.
"Startling is a book of poems that ventures simultaneously out into contemporary life with all its ambiguity, complexity and 'startling' freshness, and back into the public and personal past with all its trauma and shattered hopes. In poems that are by turns heart wrenching and witty, alive with history and alert to the here and now, burdened by memory and flowering with new life, with all the incorrigible longings that new life brings, Andrea Selch is drawn to those transitional moments when 'the August-baked and winter-deadened dooryard/swells with clover,' moments when it is possible to re-imagine ourselves and our loves in rich and marvelous ways. Startling is a fabulous, wise, funny, somber book, a book to cherish."--Alan Shapiro
"Love is difficult to voice because the emotion is so nuanced and fluctuating. Here Andrea Selch gives us the right words 'definite and permanent' that bespeak our silent hearts, startlingly."--George Elliott Clarke
"Andrea Selch's Startling nudges,
plunges us into a reassessment of time. In her finely crafted, compelling
poems, we find that time wounds as often as it heals, that it punishes us
for ignoring its passage by inexorably passing. She shows us time as the glue
and the wedge in intimate relationships; she rescues it from abstraction through
lines that yoke it to bodies--growing, reacting, consuming, wasting. Selch
moves as fluidly between humor and tenderness, between exuberance and ache,
as our lives do. She plays the language like a musical instrument: read these
poems aloud."--Evie Shockley
Andrea Selch grew up in New York City and moved to North Carolina in 1983.
She has an MFA from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and a PhD
from Duke University. She currently directs the Carolina Wren Press. She lives
in Hillsborough with her partner and their two children.
ISBN 1932339485, 80 pages, $17.00