follows the afterlife of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, while examining her love life, the power-play between siblings, and the b
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She Who Loves Her Father follows the afterlife of Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, while examining her love life, the power-play between siblings, and the burial rituals of her people--the art of preservation in tombs, crypts, vaults, and jars. Sphinxes, the Nile, pyramids, and Isis all make their appearance in this delightful little collection of poetry.
Cover art by Elayne Safir at
http://emptyminute.comTo read
Laura Madeline Wiseman’s collection is to live inside an echo, a series of glances that won’t let you go. Wiseman evokes a landscape of attentive and intimate arrivals. These revealing poems ask us to consider why we drift and how we recognize the anchor in each other.
~
Julia Cohen, author of
The History of a Lake Never DrownsAt the heart of
Laura Madeline Wiseman’s She Who Loves Her Father is the desire for human connection in all its forms—mental, emotional, sexual, physical. Nowhere is this longing more evident than in the poignant “An Email from the Living,” in which a parent writes to a child: “you didn’t respond so/ I must have the wrong address.” It is this need, often unmet, that drives the narrators of Wiseman’s poems in this winding, often wistful collection.
~
Leah Browning, author of
making love to the same man for fifteen yearsShe Who Loves Her Father is poetic archaeology, a careful search for “that thing // so unheard of, the source of the Nile / or the answer the sphinx longs for.”
Laura Madeline Wiseman’s poems find Eve (without Adam) making tea in a kitchen, Isis in the shape of a housecat, and sphinxes “nestled among the trees” who “lope toward homes made of rock.” Wiseman’s poems are cryptic in the etymological sense of crypts—they are odes to both containers and the things contained: family and daughter, stomach and food, womb and fetus. In the operation of these poems, sutures both bind and burst, bandages protect and consume. Screams turn into whispers and a dead language comes back to life in this book of riddles, where opposites swap places: “I want it to be yesterday. Then, I can mourn properly, twist it inside my mind to see how it was to me now. But I’ve got to get gone first.”
~James Cihlar, author of
Undoinghttp://www.lauramadelinewiseman.com
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