Deborah Garrison
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
Nine years after the stunning debut of her critically acclaimed poetry collection A Working Girl Can’t Win, which chronicled the progress and predicaments of a young woman, Deborah Garrison now moves into another stage of adulthood–starting a family and saying good-bye to a more carefree self.
In The Second Child, Garrison explores every facet of motherhood–the ambivalence, the trepidation, and the joy (“Sharp bliss in proximity to the roundness, / The globe already set aspin, particular / Of a whole new life”)– and comes to terms with the seismic shift in her outlook and in the world around her. She lays out her post-9/11 fears as she commutes daily to the city, continues to seek passion in her marriage, and wrestles with her feelings about faith and the mysterious gift of happiness.
Sometimes sensual, sometimes succinct, always candid, The Second Child is a meditation on the extraordinariness resident in the everyday–nursing babies, missing the past, knowing when to lead a child and knowing when to let go. With a voice sound and wise, Garrison examines a life fully lived.
Review:
"With its accessible wit, and its clear, unpretentious depictions of young Manhattanites' worries and joys, Garrison's 1998 debut, A Working Girl Can't Win, won rare attention. The poetry editor at Knopf, Garrison resides in northern New Jersey with three young children: these poems chronicle her new, decidedly family-centered life, with the same offhand charm. Writing of infants, she speaks as a mother to mothers, understanding both love and fatigue: 'Have you/ ever been in the shuttered room/ where life is milk? Where you make/ milk?' As her children grow up (and grow in number), Garrison's poetry follows them: 'No time for a sestina for the working mother/ Who has so much to do.' Other recurring topics appear through the lens of motherhood. September 11 gave her a 'powerful and inarticulate' wish 'to be pregnant'; charming amorous poems depict her continuing ties to her husband, the father of her children, and a bus ride through the Lincoln Tunnel reminds her that 'life is good,/ despite everything.' While many of Garrison's poems may not surprise, they may provoke shocks of recognition in many readers — parents, in particular — who should find both her topics and her tones reassuringly familiar." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Synopsis:
From the bestselling, critically acclaimed author of "A Working Girl Can't Win" comes an energetic, passionate, accessible, and even more accomplished collection of poetry about the joys and fears of motherhood and family life.
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About the Author
Deborah Garrison is the author of A Working Girl Can’t Win: and Other Poems. For fifteen years, she worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker and is now the poetry editor af Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books. She lives with her husband and three children in Montclair, New Jersey.
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