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  • Incarnadine by Mary Szybist book cover
  • Incarnadine by Mary Szybist book cover
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Incarnadine

by Mary Szybist

Poetry that reshapes familiar forms

$15.86 USD
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Awards & Recognition

  • Award recognition

    Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

    Source states that Incarnadine won the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry.

  • Editorial selection

    Amazon Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013

    Named Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry for 2013.

AlbakiReads Editorial

Poetry that reshapes familiar forms

Mary Szybist’s collection brings together poems that experiment with how words and ideas occupy the page. A diagrammed sentence, an abecedarium built from girls’ puzzle-making dialogue, and poems revisiting the Annunciation give the book a varied formal architecture. Its recurring concerns include love, motherhood, perception, speech, and the possibility of encountering the unknowable. Biblical imagery sits alongside ordinary details, including the unfinished dishes in poems that update the figure of Mary. The collection’s interest lies in how shifts of form and perspective can open new ways to consider meaning, belief, and everyday experience.

Good fit for readers who enjoy

  • Readers interested in contemporary American poetry and formal experimentation.
  • Readers drawn to poems engaging with religious imagery, especially the Annunciation.
  • Readers interested in themes of love, motherhood, perception, and speech.

Themes

Poetic form and experimentationReligious imagery and beliefLove and motherhoodPerception and speech

Based on publisher information and book metadata.

Book overview

Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

* An NPR, Slate, Oregonian, Kansas City Star, Willamette Week, and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year * Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013 *

In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning--for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America's most ambitious poets.

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