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AS IS

AS IS

$16.95Price

ISBN: 978-0-9800289-3-5

Pub Date: Spring 2009

Pages: 80


By Sheryl Noethe


As Is tells the heroic story: loss, struggle, victory, and how god is milk and throat at once, and rock and child, and how the future leaks outlandishly into the present. That the reason humans exist (now didn't you ever want to know that?), the reason for humans is that we can love. It's our job because that's what we were built to do. Join the Divine.


This is As Is, like it or not, the way life handed certain energy pathways and possibilities to you, the way you gripped and held on to a patch of silk or the word blue, remembering the fire that tore through the corridors of your childhood, the pasty uncles, the plastic corset, cruelty at the hands of an unhappy mom. Not confession, not confusion, but the ricocheting of energy particles in and around your wracked body, your beautiful mind, excursions through quantum mechanical dreams, to fractals and fractured addresses. The way you channel events and dark matter, luminous waves of light at the side of the road. Letting go of God, but giving him seven dollars just in case it will save his life. Calling from a phone booth, or from the bath. You read the lifelines of school kids, and give them their futures, even those who cannot make out a word they hear. You sign furiously, gently, as you trace their palms. This is a book filled with suggestive signs, insistent vocalizations: signs of the times—end times and lucent beginnings. Archeological mining of what is, as is. Forget the "it."

—Ellen Kennedy Michel


    Sheryl Noethe's poems make me laugh because I am angry and cry because I am happy. They lie to tell the truth and entertain in the cause of utmost moral seriousness. They are as colorful and uplifting as a hot air balloon—and as terrifying but ultimately exhilarating as the view down from that balloon over the Swiss Alps. Buy this book and turn to the true story on page two: "How many butterflies can you breathe for one minute and stay alive? / How many butterflies in two minutes? / In three?" Turn to page sixty, another true story: Ulysses S. Grant, suffering "severely," bathes in hot water and mustard. Turn to page 29 for this conversation: "I asked God, 'How long have you been on the road' / God replied, "Since my mother died and her husband kicked me out.'" Understand that you are hurt and Sheryl Noethe will heal you. Understand that you are ignorant and she will teach. Understand that you are lonely and she will love. Buy this book.

    —Jeremy Smith


    Sheryl Noethe was born and raised in Minnesota where she attended a highschool alternative program, Urban Arts, which allowed her to learn to write poetry. After winning the The American Academy of Poets Award and a McKnight Fellowship for Literature, she published her first collection of poetry, The Descent of Heaven Over the Lake (New Rivers Press). Her work was also included in the anthology, 25 Minnesota Poets. She moved to NYC and worked with the Teachers & Writers Collaborative, bringing poetry into the classrooms of the South Bronx, Harlem, and East New York.


    Noethe was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship as well as the Hugo Prize from the University of Montana, and a fellowship with the Montana State Arts Council. She co-authored Poetry Everywhere, a teaching text that won praise from the National Council of Teachers of English. In 1994 Noethe founded the Missoula Writing Collaborative, a program that places writers in public schools, libraries, on the Flathead Reservation, in detention homes with at-risk youth, in Hawai’ian Charter Schools and in an Alaskan village. She was awarded a Cultural Achievement Award from the Missoula Cultural Council in 2004. In 2000 Grace Court Press published her collection, The Ghost Openings, which was awarded the Pacific Northwest Bookseller’s Award and the William Stafford Poetry Prize.


    Noethe resides in Missoula, Montana at the foot of Mt. Jumbo with her fearless husband, a firefighter, where they keep a household of rescue animals, including a one-eyed feral cat named Mike Tyson. She is filled with gratitude.

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