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Burn Lake (National Poetry Series #149)
Selected for the 2009 National Poetry Series by Natasha Trethewey
Set in southern New Mexico, where her family's multicultural history is deeply rooted, the poems in Carrie Fountain's first collection explore issues of progress, history, violence, sexuality, and the self. Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with th...more
Set in southern New Mexico, where her family's multicultural history is deeply rooted, the poems in Carrie Fountain's first collection explore issues of progress, history, violence, sexuality, and the self. Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with th...more
Paperback, 81 pages
Published
May 25th 2010
by Penguin Books
(first published 2010)
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I am especially fond of poetry books that encompass sense of place and Carrie Fountain's book, Burn Lake, a winner in the National Poetry Series takes the reader to New Mexico in a stunning work of both progress and loss.
Burn Lake is a physical place in this collection and is the backdrop for many of Fountain's narrative poems. The lake itself is explored in a scattered sequence of poems. The first "Burn Lake" describes its genesis where the readers find out the town's favorite swimming hole was...more
Burn Lake is a physical place in this collection and is the backdrop for many of Fountain's narrative poems. The lake itself is explored in a scattered sequence of poems. The first "Burn Lake" describes its genesis where the readers find out the town's favorite swimming hole was...more
Jun 06, 2010
Brenda
rated it
3 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
those who perceive accessibility to be an endangered form in contemporary poetry
Whether she is writing about two girls locking themselves in the trunk of a car while their parents get drunk at a Superbowl party--or about a teacher walking out on a class full of inattentive students, Carrie Fountain composes poetry that doesn't flaunt itself as poetry. In the latter poem, a child, notifying the office of the teacher's abdication, says, "Something violent / happened here," recognizing, as Fountain puts it, that "this is one way / the violent get you: not by coming / for you,...more
Perhaps it's based on my aesthetic, but I worry Carrie Fountain's longer poems move a little slowly. She covers more rhetorical territory in her shorter ones (Ordinary Sadness for example). But how she deals with American infrastructure (literally/figuratively), misfortune and fortune in fate (and how we are inclined to label them as such), and her childhood is fresh.
Gorgeous book of poetry splicing small town life in the American SouthWest with sixteenth century explorer sent to discover new territory.
I love the structure of this book because it's simple, subtle, straight to the point and the heart.
I love the structure of this book because it's simple, subtle, straight to the point and the heart.
Carrie Fountain manages to write all the poems you want to write as a young woman but aren't good enough to pull off. And some explorer poems to boot!
Wonderful Austin poet. Read this collection straight through. Her language is clear, cool, observant, wise, and at turns, surprising.
Carrie Fountains writing is very imagistic and powerful. I felt as though I was being let in on her personal history.
This book is astonishing.
A.D.O.R.E this collection (a National Poetry Series Winner). "Let me see if I understand you/ correctly." Those were the only words/ I could beg from my guts// in asking him to explain the feelings/ he'd waited// until we'd made it to the top of this mountain/ to admit he was no longer having for me (from Continental Divide). Fountain is a poet that makes me think "I could do that...there may be a place for my collection too."
Had higher hopes for this one...
These poems read deceptively "accessible"...but they take root, grow and haunt. Simultaneously comforting and frightening, they are more acutely real than any I've read in a long time.
Oh shit, I just said that "The End of the West" was my favorite book of poems I read this semester, but I lied. This one is.
Wonderful book. Made me miss New Mexico.
Reread this today. So good.
Reread this today. So good.
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