Acts
of Contortion
Anna
George Meek
The Brittingham Prize in Poetry
Ronald Wallace, General Editor
Winner of the 2002 Brittingham Prize
in Poetry, selected by Edward Hirsch
In poems that are by turns witty,
lush, and unflinching, Acts of Contortion explores
the gestures of both hurtfulness and compassion. Whether set
in a shelter for battered women, in the midst of a political
demonstration, or at the center of an orchestra, the poems pursue
the place of language in an injurious world. The political conscience
at work is feminist, pacifist, and at odds with itself. Anna
George Meek finds that the brutal and the compassionate are sometimes
indistinguishable, born of our need to make contact outside of
ourselves. These gestures—of music, of touch, of poetry—appear
in the poems as the violin, domestic abuse, and words to comfort
a woman in pain. The poems argue: difficult yet imperative, the
attempt to gesture beyond ourselves is an act of contortion.
 Anna George Meek is a freelance violinist, violin teacher, and instructor at the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis; she has also spent several years working as crisis intervention staff at a domestic violence shelter. Her poems have appeared in Crazyhorse, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The Massachusetts Review, Missouri Review, Poetry, and other journals. She received an M.A. from the Writing Seminars at the Johns Hopkins University and an M.A. in English from Indiana University, where she was a 1995 recipient of an Academy of American Poets Prize. This is her first book.
Praise
"Acts
of Contortion is a first book of great urgency, a scorching
protest against human suffering. I am deepened immeasurably by
this work that struggles to make connections and transfigure
losses, these beautifully made poems—contorted acts!—that
hum with the music of compassion."
—Edward Hirsch
"
Reading Anna Meek's sensual and eloquent Acts of Contortion is like listening to a great symphony. Fragments from the first
bars reappear, subside, disappear, and return us once again to
her deepest perception—that the body is an instrument of
truth. Sometimes the body is lucky, and expresses itself through
the music of the violin, or through the production of passionate
speech or poetry. But sometimes the body can do nothing but break
open in the face of violence—in birth, in pain, in death.
These exquisitely crafted poems are unflinching in their honesty,
reaffirming precision over approximation as the human ideal."
—Maura Stanton
"From
its opening paean to the human hand, to its final sequence's
circus contortionist who ‘twists . . . bearing / down into
her chest like a cellist,’ Anna Meek's fine first book
returns continually to the world of the flesh, its wonders and
woes, where ‘the skin cries with love,’ and the abused
seek shelter, and a woman pregnant with twins feels how ‘her
generous body aspires to open.’ But these poems are smart
and sly as well as sensual. They attempt to be true to the fullness
of our condition, and they leave us feeling ultimately that we've
been in . . . well, good hands."
—Albert Goldbarth
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Of Related Interest:
 Ripe
Roy
Jacobstein
Winner of the 2002 Felix Pollak
Prize in Poetry, selected by Edward Hirsch |
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September
2002
LC: 2002005534 PS
92 pp. 6 x 9
|
Paper $14.95 t
ISBN 978-0-299-18264-9 |
|
Cloth OUT OF PRINT
ISBN 978-0-299-18260-1 |
 |
ADD TO CART |
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Anna is an
instructor with the Loft Literary center in Minneapolis. Their
web site is www.loft.org and
more information about her writing is available here. |
