000			01695cam a2200217 a 4500
001			056151
005			20231009193042.0
008			110913s1998 lau s000 0 eng
010			_a97032675
020			_a0807122637
050	0	0	_aPS3568.A637 _bB58 1998
082	0	0	_a811.54 RAS
100	1		_aRas, Barbara
245	1	0	_aBite every sorrow _b: poems _c/ Barbara Ras
260			_aBaton Rouge _b: Louisiana State University Press _c, 1998.
300			_axii, 79 p. _c; 24 cm.
500			_a"Winner of the Walt Whitman Award for 1997"--P. v.
520			_aRas's first collection, winner of the 1997 Walt Whitman Award, selected by C.K. Williams, explores what constitutes a sense of family today. These readable autobiographical scrapbook-collages, showing how woman's experience bears a multigenerational identity, are about pregnancy, giving birth, childhood and raising children, adulthood, ethnic (Polish) grandparents, home and work, "the gross margin/ of greed, desire billowing like a tall ship," and what it means "to spend a lifetime together." With a long-lined, striding quality, as though hiking through "whole vistas" of time, abundant and ruminative sequences of precise details ("even the saddest ones") weave together "every sorrow" of aging and "the way/ children are given to dreams." Ras transforms what might appear to be clutter with a wide-angle focus on images that depict how ordinary personal memories grow into a beautiful "life of the mind" that transcends selfhood. Reading these spacious poems, one concludes with Ras, that despite "the sadness" of memory, one "can have love,/ though often it will be mysterious."
650		4	_aPoetry, American
942			_cMO
999			_c258008 _d258008