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Also by Mary Szybist:

Incarnadine, February 2013
Paperback

INCARNADINE
By: Mary Szybist

Graywolf Press
February 2013
On Sale: February 5, 2013
70 pages
ISBN: 1555976352
EAN: 9781555976354
Paperback
Add to Wish List

Fiction Poetry

The anticipated second book by the poet Mary Szybist, author of Granted, a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award

* A Finalist for the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry *

* A Publishers Weekly Top Five Poetry Book of 2013 *

The troubadours
knew how to burn themselves through,
how to make themselves shrines to their own longing.
The spectacular was never behind them.
                        -from “The Troubadours etc.”
 
In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist’s formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry’s insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning—for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America’s most ambitious poets.

Media Buzz

Morning Edition - November 21, 2013