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POST & RAIL

POST & RAIL

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9981963-8-1, 978-0-9981963-8-1

Pub Date: Mar. 2018

Pages: 70


By Erica Funkhouser


WINNER OF THE IDAHO PRIZE FOR POETRY 2017


The formal deftness of these couplets—three per page of almost exactly the same length which are, yes, a set of fence rails. Some might find that sort of strategy suspect: the idea that a formal or structural device could shape a collection in a meaningful way, but in this case, it is so very well done. The collection’s personal, at least historically personal—family history, in which we get to know an evermore silent coal miner father and a eerily silent-but-communicative mother, as well as the fences, literal and figurative, that keep them separate and together. The family is the fence and the fence is the family; we’re on one side, and we’re on the other side of those rails. Add to this certain aspects of astronomical physics (black holes, the big bang, the sound of the universe speaking), and the book is both modest and immensely ambitious.

—Robert Wrigley, Final Judge of The Idaho Prize for Poetry 2017

    Post & Rail, Erica Funkhouser’s sixth collection of poems, is a non-linear, autobiographical book-length journey across time, place, and becoming. As a formal trellis for her sojourn into the temporal, Funkhouser lays three fully justified couplets of equal length across each page, spaced to look like the horizontal rails in post-and-rail fencing, thereby evoking the fences of her childhood, borders that would help define and separate the self and other, the wild and the tamed, but also providing portals of porosity between one world and another—human and animal, house and field, earth and sky, time and space.

    —Lisa Russ Spaar, author of Orexia and More Truly and More Strange: 100 Contemporary Self-Portrait Poems


    Erica Funkhouser's previous collections of poems—Earthly (2008), Pursuit (2002), The Actual World (1997), Sure Shot and Other Poems (1992), and Natural Affinities (1983)—were published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Alice James Books. Included in Sure Shot and Other Poems are three dramatic monologues in the voices of 19th century women: Sacagawea, Louisa May Alcott, and Annie Oakley. The Oakley poem was adapted for the stage by the Helicon Theatre Company in Los Angeles.


    Funkhouser’s work on Sacagawea led her to become involved with the production of Ken Burns’ PBS documentary on the Lewis and Clark Expedition; her essay on Sacagawea appears in Ken Burns’ and Dayton Duncan’s Lewis and Clark (Knopf, 1997). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, Poetry, Agni, and other magazines. One of her poems has been sand-blasted into the Davis Square MBTA Station in Somerville, Massachusetts. A 2007 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, Funkhouser lives in Essex, Massachusetts and teaches writing at MIT.

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