a poem by A.V. Christie
- ISBN 978-1-61019-601-7
- 5×7 paperback, 56 pages
- Retail price: $10.50 US
- Release: May 2016
With exquisite craft, A.V. Christie (1963 — 2016) threads “the body’s beautiful secrets” all “splitting and doubling” through “what a sky can hold: the rising up in it and all that falls.” As her lines suspend across these pages, we feel the fragility of our words, our bodies, our lives — of all we can hold and all we cannot. The urgency and beauty of Christie’s And I Began to Entertain Doubts inspired the creation of Folded Word’s Masters Series: This is poetry to read and carry forever.
Print copies are available to order from our shop, hosted by Big Cartel. If you live in the USA and don’t want to use PayPal, you can send a check for $10.50 (free shipping) made out to “Folded Word” with “A.V. Christie chapbook” in the comment line to: Folded Word, 79 Tracy Way, Meredith NH 03253.
- Discounted mulit-packs are available at our shop.
- Copies are available to order from most booksellers.
BIO:
A.V. Christie’s Nine Skies won the National Poetry Series in 1997 (published by University of Illinois Press); The Housing was winner of the McGovern Prize of Ashland Poetry Press in 2004; a recent chapbook, The Wonders was the Editor’s Selection from Seven Kitchens Press; she had Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Maryland State Arts Council, and Pennsylvania State Arts Council, and was widely published in journals. To learn more, please visit: www.avchristie.com
WHAT OTHERS ARE SAYING:
In this strange, original, spare, luminous poem, “pain’s profound alone-ness” is A.V. Christie’s essential subject. “I advance: a ruin, an amalgam, a tracery — wound-connected — a grievance,” writes Christie as she meditates on the metaphysics of disease. And I Began to Entertain Doubts is both shattered and shattering, an unflinchingly brilliant depiction of mortal vulnerability and endurance.
— Elizabeth Spires, author of the poetry collections Globe, Worldling, and The Wave-Maker
Only a master of the poetic art could transform the most painful raw material into subtle language of such piercing concision: “I am the thorn” (the rose implied). From the white-hot crucible of the threatened imagination comes this extended meditation of an original consciousness in its relation to organic disaster, with an integrity that resists the disorder and isolation it also records: “Each of us, this frail cell, made separate from the next. // Yet, there is a persistence.”
— Eleanor Wilner, author of Tourist in Hell and co-editor of The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process
About the Masters Series:
The Masters Series from Folded Word presents one chapbook each year from poets who have spent decades in the service of Poetry. It is a showcase for works that interweave the deeply personal with the universal — works enhanced by the elegance and brevity of the chapbook form. And I Began to Entertain Doubts by A.V. Christie is the inaugural title in the series, to be followed in 2017 with Yarrow and Smoke by William O’Daly.
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