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Many Parishes
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Koesters' Many Parishes is an original. The poems seem to smack the hard-ass contemporary world up against a deep spiritual sense, until we see they're one and the same. Adrian Koesters is able to write of men calling out to a ten-year old "spinster" to "come on down, sweetheart, I got something over here to show you," and allow us to feel in her small, frightened heart th
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Paperback, 81 pages
Published
December 15th 2013
by Brickhouse Books, Inc.
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Hard, dense, sometimes frightening, Adrian's collection leaves me in awe of her ability and fearlessness. She's my friend--lucky me--and I had no idea of the depth of her experience because I have mostly seen her quick mind and hilarious sense of humor. Many Parishes opens another door. Rather like the music of Shostakovich, she reveals a world of pain and inhuman selfishness:
and she shrinks from the men who crawl along the back gates
to beckon: "Come on down, sweetheart, I got something
over h ...more
and she shrinks from the men who crawl along the back gates
to beckon: "Come on down, sweetheart, I got something
over h ...more

This is an outstanding, meaty debut poetry collection. I'm really excited about it. I met Adrian Koesters in a master class with Marvin Bell, oh, I don't know, maybe a decade ago. Then we met again at the Nebraska Summer Writers' Conference. Koesters went on to complete her MFA at the Rainier Writers' Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University, and then to get a Ph.D. in Creative Writing at Nebraska--I much admire both programs and wish I could have afforded either one (or had a husband willing to
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The thing that impressed me the most about this collection (besides Koesters' facility of form and her balance of lyric / narrative) comes in the poems where we see through a child's eyes a difficult upbringing among adults who are at best neglectful, at worst predatory. In the hands of a lesser writer -- or a person less healthy, perhaps -- these poems could easily have been hyperbolic or self-pitying. Instead, Koesters shows children who create a dream world in a bare-bones urban setting, then
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