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by Charlotte Jeane Pence (Author)
"In this marvelous debut collection, Charlotte Pence provides us with all the pleasures of poetic tension. We have the pull of narrative and the flares of the lyric, the graceful rhythm of blank verse and the thrill of innovative forms, the contest for survival both between a father and a daughter and between Homo Sapiens and other species within our genus. The poems explore the idea of survival, not only the survival of a speaker who transcends a precarious childhood but, for example, a 'juvenile male bear with his head stuck in a plastic Walmart candy jar' who 'learned to drink by laying down in shallow streams.' In language that is sometimes word-crunchy and dense, sometimes delightfully simple ('In her small life, she is happier than before'), Pence's MANY SMALL FIRES is a beautiful, necessary book. Come, warm your hands."-Beth Ann Fennelly
Author Biography
Charlotte Pence, Mobile's Inaugural Poet Laureate, is the author of Code (recipient of ASPS book of the year), Many Small Fires, (recipient of the Foreword Reviews silver medal Indie Poetry of the year) and The Branches, the Axes, the Missing (recipient of the Black River Chapbook Prize). She is also a MacDowell fellow, Sewanee Writers Conference fellow, and a Vanderbilt Patterson Fellow. A graduate of Emerson College (MFA) and the University of Tennessee (PhD), she is now the director of the Stokes Center for Creative Writing at University of South Alabama.
