Ink for an Odd Cartography by Michele Battiste

Michele Battiste

Michele Battiste's first full-length collection, Ink for an Odd Cartography, was a finalist for the St. Lawrence Book Award and published by Black Lawrence Press in 2009. She is also the author of three chapbooks, the most recent of which is Slow the Appetite Down (Spire Press, 2009). Her poems have recently appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, Verse Daily, Poetry International, and Mid-American Review. Her book reviews have appeared in Rain Taxi and Rattle, and she curated two reading series: The Bodega Writers Collective in Syracuse, NY and Waltz Reading Series in Astoria, NY. She is the recipient of a Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prize, a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, an AWP Intros Award, a New York State Senate Arts and Culture Grant, a Special Opportunities Stipend (SOS) from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the 2004 MFA Poetry Fellow at Wichita State University. She currently lives in Boulder, CO, where she teaches, studies and wades in the creek.

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Ink for an Odd Cartography

Michele Battiste

Release Date: April 1, 2009

ISBN: 978-1934703472

DESCRIPTION

How can poems map the distance between bodies or mark the boundaries separating action and desire? Award-winning poet Michele Battiste explores uncharted physical and psychic ground in Ink for an Odd Cartography, a revealing collection of narrative poems which travels from San Francisco to Wichita to New York City, surveying the places and spaces where children talk to gravel, stalkers give pointers, bridges are naughty, and fallen angels kill time in night clubs.

Poet and editor Jim Daniels says that Battiste's poems "spin and spill all over the place with a controlled recklessness and a sustained energy." Two-time National Critics Book Circle Award winner Albert Goldbarth calls Battiste a "high-IQ-and-octane, brazen-21st-century chick" who writes with a "rollercoastering sensibility."

ADVANCE PRAISE

“These poems are driven by some super high-octane duende...in tune with the mad universe.” —Jim Daniels

REVIEWS

"A fascinating and enthralling book of poetry, Ink for Odd Cartography is a great pick." —Midwest Book Review

"The center for this book is intimate relationships and what makes them work or fail. What kept startling me was the honesty in the poems, the honesty about both the speaker's struggles and the loved one's struggles." —Sandy Longhorn

"Putting down Michele Battiste’s frenetic, brain-bending book is going to leave skid marks all over your desk... In Battiste’s cartography, the most unlikely and disparate entities, locations and people are connected by a tender, tough and disarming intelligence." —No Tell

"These poems have a madcap precision; from the haphazard shreds of daily, searching existence... they draw meaning so deep it doesn't need to be expressed, because it's there, it's felt. It is immediately recognizable as life." --Watermark Book Reviews