Tourist in the Pure Land

by Kate Green

Overview

Kate Green's second full-length book of poetry spans thirty years of writing, an accumulation of lyricism layered with wisdom. Her poems illuminate ordinary, broken things, drawing us toward the transcendent in the everyday. She is a native Minnesota poet, and her verse is grounded in that northern realm. But her work is anything but provincial, evoking as it does images and sensations that resonate within us all. Her recollection of her father's mystical quest for the deep-swimming walleyed pike—"monstrous lunkers, dying of old age"—is both amusing and recognizable to anyone with their own obsessions. From lush Caribbean islands to the arid hills of New Mexico to the innermost recesses of her own body, this poet's vibrant voice takes the reader into her own "pure land."

From "Question for the Newborn":

if you think back
maybe it will come to you,
the ecstatic pain of cells dividing,
face coiling out of the brain,
the time in the mothery sea
when the outside of your face
was the same as your mind
and your skin was not a shell
but the inside of a flower
that in turn was a wound
so open we call it human.

Kate Green's poetry has received two Bush Foundation Fellowships in Poetry and a Loft McKnight Award. Her novel Shattered Moon was nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award and was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. She has published four other mystery novels and eight books for children. She teaches college writing in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780985981846
Publisher:	Holy Cow! Press
Publication date:	04/22/2014
Pages:	102
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Kate Green (B.A. ’72), who earned her master’s degree in creative writing from Boston University (where she studied with John Cheever and Anne Sexton), has taught at the University of Minnesota and Hamline University and is now at North Hennepin Community College.

Author of the 1986 Edgar Award–winning mystery "Shattered Moon," Green has published five novels, eight children’s books, and two collections of poetry. Her novels were selected by the Book of the Month Club and translated into ten languages. She has won a Minnesota Book Award and two Bush Foundation Fellowships for Poetry and has raised three sons, also writers, who write hip-hop and spoken word. She is collaborating on a children’s book with her middle son, Elliot Looney, on The Man, which follows a black man as he searches for direction and identity. This summer she plans to finish a memoir about her experience as a white mother raising multiracial children.

Table of Contents

Part I Saints and Fishing 1

Movies 3

The Function of Memory 5

Broom 7

Hunting 8

Grace 9

Vacation 10

Key West: Tennessee William's House 11

Garden 12

Vet 13

Question for the Newborn 15

Milk Ritual 16

Past Life 18

Persephone's Ascent 20

Saints and Fishing 22

Basement 25

Sightseeing 26

Looking the Other Way 27

Glass of Milk 28

Coast of Gold 29

Part II The Practice 31

The Guide 33

Sanctuary 35

The Practice 38

Life Everlasting 40

Draft Card Burning, 1968 41

Weapons 43

Pink Walls with Paintings 44

Appetite 46

Beauty, 1963 47

Day After Vernal Equinox 48

Ghosts 49

First Prayer, Eight Years Old 50

Café, Taos 51

Words Themselves 53

Mother's Crossword, 1960 54

Mother Hunger 56

What Picasso Saw 58

The Trip 60

Part III Tourist in the Pure Land 61

Saturday Night at the Emporium of Jazz 63

Zen Deathbed Poems 66

Three Suns 68

At the Gateway 70

Key West: Ernest Hemingway's House 72

What We've Come To 73

How You Go On 74

The Question About Women 75

Notations: Poolside 77

Letting Go 80

Meditation Retreat in 12 Parts 81

Tourist in the Pure Land 84

Manatee and Pelican 86

About the Author 89

Editorial Reviews

The Minneapolis Tribune, September 21st, 2014:

"What brings the collection together is Green's emphasis on looking at her subject head-on with unadorned language...(Her) second full-length collection is full of the real world made luminous through her attention."--Elizabeth Hoover


“I have admired and envied Kate Green’s poems for more than thirty years. When you read the poem 'Saturday Night at the Emporium of Jazz,' a poem written three decades ago, you will see why. When you read the poem 'Tourist in the Pure Land,' a poem written very recently, you will once again see why. The poems beguile in so many ways, but in the end it is their music which most does me in. It’s been far too long a wait for this new book. When the gods one day turn to reading poetry to try to understand the ways of humans—passionate, heartbreaking, mystifying, mysterious ways—they would do well to start with this very book.”--Jim Moore, author of Invisible Strings: Poems


“We have waited too long for another extraordinary book of poems from Kate Green. Her vision, as in her previous book, If the World is Running Out, is as large as the world as it makes its way onto the page. These artful and extravagant poems speak with the authority of a pilgrim on whom nothing is lost no matter how far she has to travel to find herself at home. Her work speaks of the “pure land” within our own hearts, revealing the regenerative power of poetry.”--Cary Waterman, author of Book of Fire


“Kate Green's marvelous new collection of poems takes us deep into the journey of what it means to be human--we travel inward to the beginning of our being and we fly outward to Taos, Key West, fishing on a northern Minnesota lake. Every moment is etched with a care and precision that can only come from living fully, and then having the presence of mind to write it down. These poems bless us all.”--Mary Logue, author of Hand Work and Trees


" 'Without loss there is no singing,' Kate Green writes. 'We can't hold what we love, / in arms, in any way. . . . I imagine memory is a slow act / of dying.' And yet here are her poems--fierce and tender songs that travel, sure-footed, from the Midwest to Key West, from childhood to the barely-charted terrain of the human heart. Here are poems that are radiant and very much alive, all held in the pages of this marvelous book."--Katrina Vandenberg, author of The Alphabet Not Unlike the World

From the Publisher