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THE VOLUPTUARY

THE VOLUPTUARY

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9844510-3-6

Pub Date: Sept. 2010

Pages: 128


By Paulann Petersen


The Voluptuary is vast; its pages define magnanimity. The contrasts within it are razor sharp—sun and moon, darkness and light, bumblebee and raven—all parts of life shot through with the silken strands of green, of grass in the fields and leaves on the trees, everything bathed in honeyed light. Paulann Petersen’s poems read as if they are pieces from an “endless library,” as she implies in her definition of poetry, something infinite and deep, like a well. She sees her words cast from a sounding-bowl across the sky, words as fine as “any line-up of suns a night sky could flaunt.” Those worlds illuminate our path to the well. We lift our shining gourds and drink.

—Greg Simon

    These are the poems of an enraptured heart and mind, of clear eyes and ears doing the soul’s seeing and hearing. They vividly prove the unchanged function and relevance of poetry: to crystallize unsayable, non-verbal inner states, and to sanctify every world it touches. The Voluptuary brings us necessary visionary news of a profound sanity rooted in ecstatic love for creation.

    —Li-Young Lee


    Permeated with vision and spirit and the luck of “a thousand green say-so’s,” Paulann Petersen, nee Paulann Whitman, lives the life poetry invites us to find—deftly weaving tendrils of earth and mind into a precisely elegant terrain. These poems are large and loving enough for everyone to feel at home in.

    —Naomi Shihab Nye


    Oregon’s sixth Poet Laureate, Paulann Petersen is a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University whose poems have appeared in many publications including Poetry, The New Republic, Prairie Schooner, and Wilderness Magazine. She has four chapbooks (Under the Sign of a Neon Wolf, The Animal Bride, Fabrication, and The Hermaphrodite Flower). Her first full-length collection of poems, The Wided Awake (2002), was published by Confluence Press. A second, Blood-Silk (2004), poems about Turkey, was published by Quiet Lion Press of Portland. Another, A Bride of Narrow Escape (2006), was published by Cloudbank Books as part of its Northwest Poetry Series and was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award. A fourth collection, Kindle (2008), was published by Mountains and Rivers Press.


    Her work has been selected for Poetry Daily online, and for Poetry in Motion, which puts poems on busses and light rail cars in the Portland metropolitan area. In addition to having taught high school English, she’s been on the faculty for Fishtrap, and has given workshops for Oregon Writers Workshop, Oregon State Poetry Association, Mountain Writers Series, OCTE and NCTE Conferences, and the Northwest Writing Institute at Lewis & Clark College. The recipient of the 2006 Literary Arts Stewart Holbrook Award for Outstanding Contributions to Oregon’s Literary Life, she serves on the board for Friends of William Stafford, organizing the annual William Stafford birthday events each January.


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