Best Bones

Winner of the 2013 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

Best Bones is a house. When you walk around the rooms of the house, you overhear the desires and griefs of a family, as well as the unresolved concerns of lingering ghosts. The various voices in the house struggle against the family roles and social identities that they must wear like heavy garments-mother, father, wife, husband, sister, brother, servant, and master. All these voices crave unification; they want to join themselves into one whole sentient being, into "a mansion steering itself."

The poems in Best Bones also explore the experience of living in a physical body, and how the natural world intersects with manmade landscapes and technologies. In it, mother has a reset button, servants blend into the furniture, and a doctor patiently oversees the pregnancy of the earth.

In these poems, the body is a working machine, a repository of childhood myth and archetype, and a window to the spiritual world. The poems strive to be visceral on the level of dream, or of a story that is half remembered and half fabricated.

Author: Sarah Rose Nordgren
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Published: 09/04/2014
Pages: 88
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.30d
ISBN13: 9780822963172
ISBN10: 0822963175
BISAC Categories:
- Poetry | American | General

About the Author
Sarah Rose Nordgren's poems have appeared in Agni, Ploughshares, The Iowa Review, the Harvard Review, The Literary Review, the Best New Poets anthology, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of two fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and an Individual Excellence Award from the Ohio Arts Council. She lives in Cincinnati, Ohio.