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THISTLE

THISTLE

$18.00Price

ISBN: 978-0-9762114-1-9

Pub Date: Spring 2006

Pages: 84


By Melissa Kwasny


These thirty-seven poems are eccentric in the true meaning of the word—off-center. Their titles, bearing the names of weeds, flowers, herbs, trees, are merely points of departure. “How hard can it be,” the poet asks, “to lie down in the green / mussed bed of the senses . . . In clover.” Whether it's clover or rue, aspen or moss, the reader is invited into that rumpled but rich bed.

—Maxine Kumin


As nearly all our great poets tell us, it is by attending scrupulously to other that we best understand ourselves. So it is that in Melissa Kwasny's tender, brilliantly described encounters with the vegetable world we see, in the midst of the most respectful observations of each beloved species—whether it be tree lichen, kinnikinnick, wild rose, human being, or rue—great depths of world and self knowledge. One benefit of such reverent scrutiny is the courage finally to ask, as Emily Dickinson herself might have asked, one of the biggest “what if's” of all. For if, as in Kwasny's “Shrinking Violets,” “the largest animal in the world is God”, and, later, “There are no words/ for my transgressions, only the space / between leaving one god for another, / a male for a female”, then, naturally, she may ask, “What if the sibyl called the voice of God her own?”

— Patricia Goedicke

    Haunting melodies, rhythms that rise out of the earth to bask in sunlight or weather storms, images that are just so damn fine they don’t leave your memory. This book is about plants, a woman, and the places they integrate. Simply said, I urge you to visit your nearest bookstore and purchase this book. You will never regret it. And give one to every gardener and naturalist you know.

    —Paul S. Piper


    While Kwasny often hears the plants through projection (& sometimes through smell, “a fume to force the bud of my heart”), the reader will hear each plant’s voice talk through the lyrical poems’ tones & rhythms. Each poem is for one specific plant, herb, or flower, & each poem has musical subtleties that reflect the plant’s voice. Thistle is a bouquet of plants speaking poems.

    —Tom Holmes


    A resident of Montana, Melissa Kwasny is the author of the poetry collections The Archival Birds (2000), Thistle (2006), Reading Novalis in Montana (2009), and The Nine Senses (2011), as well as the novels Modern Daughters of the Outlaw West (1990) and Trees Call for What They Need (1993). Her collection of essays is titled Earth Recitals: Essays on Image and Vision (2012). She is also the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800–1950 (2004), and, with M.L. Smoker, the anthology I Go to the Ruined Place: Contemporary Poems in Defense of Global Human Rights (2009, Lost Horse Press).


    Thistle was the Silver Medal winner of ForeWord magazine’s 2007 Book of the Year Award for Poetry and the winner of the Idaho Prize. Christopher Howell, judging for the Idaho Prize, found Thistle to be in “the great tradition of meditative poetry.” Of Reading Novalis in Montana, reviewer Melinda Wilson commented, “Both Novalis and Kwasny insist that sentience of all that surrounds humankind is central to a full existence . . . Kwasny consistently relies on the marriage of man and nature to inform her understanding of existence.” Kwasny won the 2009 Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2009 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. Reading Novalis in Montana was picked by Anis Shivani of the Huffington Post as one the top 10 books of 2009.


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