Romance Language (Able Muse Book Award for Poetry)

<p>Amy Glynn's <em>Romance Language</em> is a wellspring of culture nature natural phenomena myths esoterica. A kaleidoscope of sciences and disciplines-spanning archeology acoustics botany zoology psychology cosmology meteorology mythology-are freely juxtaposed with the bliss of romance gained to longing for the one lost the celebration of nature and the teeming creatures therein to hope for their enduring sustenance. A logophilic showcase and worthy winner of the 2022 Able Muse Book Award <em>Romance Language</em> transports the reader into a sensory and cerebral world of the real and imagined ever reaching for stimulus wisdom understanding and enlightenment.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>PRAISE FOR <em>ROMANCE LANGUAGE</em>:</strong></p><p><br></p><p><em>Romance Language</em> thrills to the natural world in all its boggling multiplicity while reserving a barrage of tart ironies for the fallen humans who inhabit it-the lovers who fail us and those long gone we can never let go of. Glynn understands that science is no check to mystery that we subsist in an ocean of cadence that was here before us: The beginning was music. There was music first. Her songs channel that original music of tide chaos and rhythm with such fierceness and sorrow that we are compelled to listen. Their effect is revelatory.</p><p>-David Yezzi author of <em>More Things in Heaven</em> and <em>Late Romance: Anthony Hecht</em></p><p><br></p><p>The poems in <em>Romance Language</em> consistently and seemingly without effort manage a remarkable feat: they're unfailingly attentive to the situational subtext that underlies each foray whether into nature art or mythology. With their rueful irony and wit their candor and self-awareness these poems are not only technically flawless but also insistently and sometimes tetchily human.</p><p>-Rachel Hadas 2022 Able Muse Book Award judge author of <em>Love and Dread</em></p><p><br></p><p>Amy Glynn has built upon her naturalist's precision her musician's ear and her talent for unexpected but apt metaphor with a heightened attention to what we learn in love. <em>Romance Language</em> is as much about language though as it is about romance. Glynn is a dazzling word-hoarder and -shaper. With serious wit she entwines autobiography with the life of other creatures (most beautifully birds) and knows our own scale in the landscape and seascape. For all her artifice her plainest truths are the most moving as when she hopes for a gift // for seeing as a gift whatever happens / to us. These poems happen to the reader as a great gift too.</p><p>-Mary Jo Salter author of <em>Zoom Rooms</em> and <em>The Surveyors</em></p><p><br></p><p>Glynn brings a polymathic sensibility to her writing conversant in both high and vernacular diction on subjects ranging widely from science and classical literature to current politics and pop culture. The poems-bold vibrant mercurial mysterious sometimes wickedly funny and always highly musical-remind me that form is a living breathing part of our contemporary canon. Whether fixed like the sonnet or ghazal or nonce or free verse-these poems are constructed with great passion and precision and the result is a luminous powerful and utterly original outpouring.</p><p>-Rebecca Foust author of <em>Paradise Drive</em> and <em>Only</em></p><p><br></p><p><strong>ABOUT THE AUTHOR:</strong></p><p><br></p><p>Amy Glynn is a poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies including <em>The Best American Poetry</em>. She is the author of <em>A Modern Herbal</em> (Measure Press 2013). She has received the Troubadour Prize The SPUR Award of the Academy of Western Writers <em>Poetry Northwest</em>'s Carolyn Kizer Award and two James Merrill House fellowships among other honors. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.</p><p><br></p>