ABOUT THIS BOOK

From Carole Simmons Oles comes a new modern poetry biography, this one based on the life of American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (1830–1908). After an exceptional apprenticeship in Rome, Hosmer opened a studio there where she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and the Brownings. Though some of her work survives today, much of it has disappeared. Oles rediscovers Hosmer’s life in Waking Stone. This is a dialogue, an exploration of what Oles calls their “parallel universes.” In beautiful and affecting lyric and narrative poems, some in Hosmer’s voice, some in her own, Oles bends time and circumstances to reveal the essential kinship between two women artists. Oles keeps readers moving through Hosmer’s story, with its flashes of delight, anger, mischief, and triumph, as well as through Oles’s life and time, speaking imaginatively to young women about cutting themselves with razor blades, and to older women about suffering disfiguring treatments for breast cancer.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Carole Simmons Oles is a professor of English at California State University at Chico. She is the author of a number of books, including Night Watches: Inventions on the Life of Maria Mitchell, Stunts, and Sympathetic Systems. Among her honors are a Poetry Society of America Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and four Prairie Schooner Awards.

REVIEWS

“How often is a book of poems simultaneously inspiring, informative, fun, solid as marble, sensuous as flesh, tough-minded and downright beautiful? Waking Stone is all those things. . . . When I started, I couldn’t stop—the force of these poems blew me away.” —Alicia Ostriker, author of No Heaven “In this astounding and flawlessly structured book Oles has entered into a passionate dialogue with . . . Hosmer.” —Richard Jackson, author of Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems “Oles has deftly, clearly, resolutely brought to light the story of this 19th century woman artist.” —Rosanna Warren, author of Departure: Poems

TABLE OF CONTENTS

 Contents
Acknowledgments	000
Foreword	000
Invocation to Hatty	000
Mother at Her Easel: A Memory	000
I Misbehave: Self-Defenses	000
I Find My Place: Mrs. Sedgwick's School	000
I Am Lowered, I Am Raised	000
The Body Forbidden	000
That Other River: the Mississippi	000
More Wildlife Study	000
Linkage	000
From Backyard Studio, to Rome	000
Enroute to Rome, October, 1852	000
Finding My Master	000
My First Child, and Another Daughter 	000
My First Full-Figure Daughter	000
On Marriage, How Many Times Must I Tell You	000
Preparing for Dinner Guests, Mindful of Hatty	000
Making Money	000
Rumor	000
Astronomer Maria Mitchell Meets Harriet Hosmer	000
To Hatty on Easter Sunday, Among Spirits	000
Beginning and Ending with Mahler's Kindertotenlieder	000
Her Story, My Daughter Beatrice	000
Beatrice Dreams	000
Hatty's Anxiety Dream	000
Tomb of Judith Falconnet	000
Today, Sant'Andrea Delle Fratte	000
Purification	000
To Hatty, on Boils	000
My Clothes	000
Hatty Revises Current Fashion	000
Zenobia Speaks, in Chains and Free	000
The Critics Comment on Zenobia	000
I Fight the Battle of the Amazons	000
Thomas Hart Benton, in Bronze	000
Astoria, New York Interlude: Italian Notebook	000
I Tell Hatty the Effacing Dream	000
Stonecarver, Restoring	000
Flesh and Stone	000
Thinking, Making Ready	000
Hatty to Posterity: On Friendship, Flirtation, and the Fury to Wed	000
Permanent Magnets	000
My Rome, Vanishing	000
Crossing Zones	000
Parallel Universes	000
I Rededicate Watertown's Hosmer School to You, Hatty	000
Hatty's Dream, 1902	000
I Didn't Want to Admit It	000
Brief Letter from Hatty and Author's Response	000
The Tenth Muse	000
February 21, Then and Now	000
Afterword	000
Notes	000

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