Tramp: Poems

by Joelle Biele

Overview

Using newspaper accounts and court records from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Joelle Biele’s poems tell the personal stories of women who left their homes and families to tramp the roads and rails. Driven by poverty, abuse, or a desire for a better life, these women often encountered misery and danger in their quest for freedom, as interviews and printed records attest. In Tramp, Biele weaves these real-life stories into poignant and insightful verse that gives us a window into previously unexplored lives.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780807167915
Publisher:	Louisiana State University Press
Publication date:	02/19/2018
Series:	Barataria Poetry
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Joelle Biele is the author of the poetry collections White Summer and Broom and the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and “The New Yorker”: The Complete Correspondence. She has taught American literature and creative writing at Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Goucher College, the University of Oldenburg, Germany, and Jagiellonian University, Poland.

Editorial Reviews

With attention to craft and voice, research and beauty, Joelle Biele writes a world that is at once entirely new and fundamentally true. Thanks to Tramp, my heart and my mind are more open, more full.

Camille Dungy

With daring and panache, Joelle Biele pulls us onto the boxcars occupied by early twentieth-century ‘tramps,’ and we experience their adventures and dangers, their alternative histories, existing outside the conventional narrative. . . . What a rush it is to occupy, for a time, a life like ‘a horse too wild to ride,’ to gaze from an accelerating train at ‘a silo that dreams of nothing but thunder and grain.’ What a magnificent journey.

Beth Ann Fennelly

Tramp is documentary poetics at its finest. These unforgettable characters, women who rode the rails, their stories by turns astonishing and heartbreaking, make this a book a reader will devour in a single sitting.

Jacqueline Osherow