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All Blue So Late: Poems
Northwestern University Press, 2018 eISBN: 978-0-8101-3635-9 | Paper: 978-0-8101-3634-2 Library of Congress Classification PS3619.W436A78 2018 Dewey Decimal Classification 811.6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
All Blue So Late presents the panorama of a young woman’s life as she struggles to come to terms with her place in the world. These poems look to race, gender, and American identity, plumbing the individual’s attendant grief, rage, and discomfort with these constructs.
The skeleton of this fine collection is a series of direct addresses to the author’s fourteen-year-old self, caught at the moment between girlhood and womanhood, when her perspective on everything suddenly changes. Swearingen-Steadwell’s poetic adventures through worlds within and without reveal the restlessness of the seeker. They offer unabashed tenderness to anyone who reckons with solitude, and chases joy. See other books on: African American & Black | Poems | Poetry | Teenage girls | Women Authors See other titles from Northwestern University Press |
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All Blue So Late: Poems
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
by Laura Swearingen-Steadwell
Northwestern University Press, 2018
eISBN: 978-0-8101-3635-9
Paper: 978-0-8101-3634-2
eISBN: 978-0-8101-3635-9
Paper: 978-0-8101-3634-2
All Blue So Late presents the panorama of a young woman’s life as she struggles to come to terms with her place in the world. These poems look to race, gender, and American identity, plumbing the individual’s attendant grief, rage, and discomfort with these constructs.
The skeleton of this fine collection is a series of direct addresses to the author’s fourteen-year-old self, caught at the moment between girlhood and womanhood, when her perspective on everything suddenly changes. Swearingen-Steadwell’s poetic adventures through worlds within and without reveal the restlessness of the seeker. They offer unabashed tenderness to anyone who reckons with solitude, and chases joy.
The skeleton of this fine collection is a series of direct addresses to the author’s fourteen-year-old self, caught at the moment between girlhood and womanhood, when her perspective on everything suddenly changes. Swearingen-Steadwell’s poetic adventures through worlds within and without reveal the restlessness of the seeker. They offer unabashed tenderness to anyone who reckons with solitude, and chases joy.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY
LAURA SWEARINGEN-STEADWELL is the author of How to Seduce a White Boy in Ten Easy Steps. A Cave Canem Fellow and a graduate of Warren Wilson’s M.F.A. Program for Writers, she was a finalist in 2010’s Women of the World Poetry Slam.
REVIEWS
"All Blue So Late is a haunting coming of age; a slow and writhing eruption of womanhood through layers of heat, siren and loss. Laura Swearingen-Steadwell has a plaintive, truthful voice that ripples with blues and never wavers towards solipsism. She reckons with an American landscape of Midwestern fluorescence and coastal grit to render poems fused with blistered song." —Tyehimba Jess, author of Olio and Leadbelly
"This beautiful collection could very well have been written to save lives—the speaker’s, yes, and mine (a black woman poet). Perhaps, even yours. I’d slide this volume into the hands of any black girl or woman on a cusp—the coming-of-age 9th grader, the 18-year-old striking out on her own, the woman exiting a relationship, pairs of female friends... Swearingen-Steadwell is a true logophile, as seen in the way her careful diction and well-wrought images offer the reader glimpses into her worldly travels. One of the book’s many pleasures is the way she’s seeded these lyric-narrative hybrids with place details and subject-specific lexicon, a testimony to the superb wordsmith she is. For the curious and attentive reader, this book opens like a flower, one poem at a time." —Maya Marshall, RHINO Reviews
"In All Blue So Late, Laura Swearingen-Steadwell reminds us that history is personal, and the personal is history. In cyclical poems that play the past off the present, Swearingen-Steadwell builds a large and captivating story out of smaller lyric moments, the resulting work both whispered as if to a friend and declaimed as if from a stage. The speaker of these poems claims 'I’ll tell you all my secrets' but in the end what is not shared is almost as powerful as what is." —C. Dale Young, author of The Day Underneath the Day and The Halo
"All Blue So Late emerges from the beautiful refusal to choose between lyric and narrative modes. Part adventure novel, part tragic opera, part psychosocial quest, this collection goes 'bildungsromaning' on its own fiercely original course. The journey is symphonic, layered, and gripping. Laura Swearingen-Steadwell’s first collection has been eagerly anticipated for good reason: her voice holds '[g]hosts/ dissolving on an outstretched tongue' and movingly gifts language with “the benefit/of new intention.'" —Mary Szybist, author of Incarnadine: Poems
"All Blue So Late is a collection of libretti for agitated souls. Each poem has deeply inventive and disturbing candor. Laura Swearingen-Steadwell is narratively fearless. Her ghosts and demons rise from a deeper place than I could have previously imagined. If there is a template for the autobiographical/ mystical dimensions of this book, it perhaps is 'The Woman Pouring Handfuls of Ash.' The fabrics of this poet's experience may at first seem torn to pieces and then, to a careful reader, finally reveal themselves as whole-cloth and entirely beautiful. An immensely talented poet." —Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder
"All Blue So Late is a collection of libretti for agitated souls. Each poem has deeply inventive and disturbing candor. Laura Swearingen-Steadwell is narratively fearless. Her ghosts and demons rise from a deeper place than I could have previously imagined. If there is a template for the autobiographical/ mystical dimensions of this book, it perhaps is 'The Woman Pouring Handfuls of Ash.' The fabrics of this poet's experience may at first seem torn to pieces and then, to a careful reader, finally reveal themselves as whole-cloth and entirely beautiful. An immensely talented poet." —Howard Norman, author of Next Life Might Be Kinder
TABLE OF CONTENTS
14 4
Moebius 5
Caldera 7
Building the Quabbin 8
14 9
Necropolis 10
processional 12
14 13
Sakura 14
In the Orchard 15
When the Man Talked Around Me,
When He Talked Over Me 16
14 17
Cafeteria Tech 18
The Woman Pouring Handfuls of Ash 19
If it helps, 22
14 23
Last Composition 24
Sandusky Bay 26
14 27
To Love Men Is to Love What Can Kill You 28
14 29
La Macabra 30
14 31
Charleston // Squaw Valley 32
National Cemetery 33
At Cedar Point, I Become American Again 35
14 36
Patrick 37
Genre 38
14 39
See Then Now 40
the dead black girl doesn't care 43
Church and State of Being 44
14 45
Pecha Kucha for Suicides, Seekers, and Ecstatics 46
Submerge 48
Valentine (Underground) 49
14 51
heat and the sirens return 52
So the bell rings 53
The Long Walk Home 54
14 55
Orvieto 56
22 Antrim Street 57
Power 59
14 62
Acknowledgments 63
Gratitude 64
Moebius 5
Caldera 7
Building the Quabbin 8
14 9
Necropolis 10
processional 12
14 13
Sakura 14
In the Orchard 15
When the Man Talked Around Me,
When He Talked Over Me 16
14 17
Cafeteria Tech 18
The Woman Pouring Handfuls of Ash 19
If it helps, 22
14 23
Last Composition 24
Sandusky Bay 26
14 27
To Love Men Is to Love What Can Kill You 28
14 29
La Macabra 30
14 31
Charleston // Squaw Valley 32
National Cemetery 33
At Cedar Point, I Become American Again 35
14 36
Patrick 37
Genre 38
14 39
See Then Now 40
the dead black girl doesn't care 43
Church and State of Being 44
14 45
Pecha Kucha for Suicides, Seekers, and Ecstatics 46
Submerge 48
Valentine (Underground) 49
14 51
heat and the sirens return 52
So the bell rings 53
The Long Walk Home 54
14 55
Orvieto 56
22 Antrim Street 57
Power 59
14 62
Acknowledgments 63
Gratitude 64
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ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
