Gloryland

by Anne Marie Macari

Overview

Gloryland re-examines motherhood, death, birth, and rebirth, drawing on religious and secular creation myths to enact a feminist religion. Bold, rich lyrics reveal the grand in the domestic, claiming the physical as an essential part of the -female experience, declaring that to live fully in the body is the truest, bravest, and most glorious form of worship.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781938584558
Publisher:	Alice James Books
Publication date:	12/01/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	80
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Anne Marie Macari’s first book, Ivory Cradle, won the APR/Honickman First Book Prize in 2000. Her poems have been published in many magazines, such as TriQuarterly, The American Poetry Review, Five Points, and The Iowa Review. Macari is on the core faculty of the New England College low residency MFA program.

Read an Excerpt

Book One

Light was being, held by her own hands or
touched like water burning bare skin.
In the beginning meant learning to see: a thousand
kinds of green, the vine-crawl along rocks,
the groping mouths of flowers. In the beginning
all they knew was yes, so when the first no
settled quietly around the tree
they thought it birdsong, it took days or weeks
for them to even notice its echo
in the leaves, an absence really, the start of loss.
Later, when the suffering began, who could
she turn to and say: I didn’t ask to be born,
squatting, the light separate and cold, distant
as God, and she, already, refusing to kneel.

Table of Contents

1
	Mary's Blood	3
	New York, 1927	5
	Night Feeding	7
	Soup	9
	Child Resting on Her Desk	10
	No Prophecy	12
	As If the Body	13
	Annunciation	14
	With Child	17
	Palace of Longing	19
	Absence	21
	Abort	23
	Horseshoe Crabs	25
	In the Kingdom of Cloth	26
	Snowfall	28
	The Accident	29
	Stick of Light	30
	Still Life with Magnolia and Dove	31
	September	33
	Blue Duck	34
	Have You Ever Started Your Life Over?	35
2
	Book One	39
	Madonna Enthroned	40
	An Explanation for Galileo	42
	The Man in the Garden	44
	Of All the Gods	46
	Seed	47
	The Stolen Bible	48
	Elegy for a Girl Singer	50
	Rose-bed	52
	Even Love	53
	Cut Roses	54
	Madame Sherri's House	55
	Sickness	57
	Glass Beach	59
	Sunbathing	61
	All the Earth Around	63
	Radio	65
	Drenched	67
	Little Church	69
	Gloryland	72
	What Will You Feed Them?	74

Editorial Reviews

Ann Marie Macari’s powerful poems make poetic speech seem an utterly natural act. She is the latest ambassador of a great lineage of strong poets whose subject is blood-knowledge. Sexual without needing to be seductive, spiritual without being sentimental, tough and full-bodied, I like so very much the way the poems are always in hot pursuit of the serious mysteries (kinship, sex, mortality)—at once blind and deeply intelligent, pushing into the underbrush of knowing. Gloryland is a sensational collection.”—Tony Hoagland

"This is what poetry does for me when it opens the self and enters the deep places, the sea bottom where our lonely islands are connected. It gives joy." —Alicia Ostriker

From the Publisher