The Arranged Marriage
72 pages, 6 x 9
Paperback
Release Date:01 Mar 2015
ISBN:9780826355539
The Arranged Marriage
Poems
University of New Mexico Press
With her characteristic music and precision, Dubrow delves unflinchingly into a mother’s story of trauma and captivity. The poet proves that truth telling and vision can give meaning to the gravest situations, allowing women to create a future on their own terms.
[A] powerful new volume of poetry…that exquisitely addresses the nuances of survival, adaptation, and exile.
Using prose blocks, Dubrow employs poetic phrasing and distillation as well as the freedom of traditional narrative to interpret her mother’s life, but the striking work resonates far beyond the specifics of her project, extending into the common experiences of fear and trauma.
Bold writing with visionary power and strong language.…I couldn’t stop reading it.
Call it the speculative, or the subjunctive, or the surreal. You’ll call it stunning and surprising, too. Dubrow has transformed language into paint, film, and shutter. She has stretched back in time to the beginning before the beginning, out in range to the landscape beyond the frame. Her book is a map. Her atlas is a canvas. Her history is a photograph. Put another way, her project is part genealogy, part inheritance, and all art of the highest order.
Jehanne Dubrow in her fifth book of poems tells us a story so compelling that we put down our tasks and turn to her voice.
We witness in these pages raw violence of marriages arranged, marriages broken. We feel the knife blade, recognize as our own every wounded body.
Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four previous poetry collections, including Stateside and Red Army Red. She is the director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and is an associate professor of English at Washington College.
