03/09/2024
Happy Pub Day to Linda Watanabe McFerrin, whose book POST-Apocalyptic Valentine is 7.13 Books #33, our first book of poetry. Cover by Gigi Little. The book's been praised by Anne Lamott and others, and you can order it now at Bookshop, Amazon, and wherever books can be ordered.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, novelist and travel writer Linda Watanabe McFerrin’s new poetry collection navigates the spaces between depression, humor, and dark revelation. With inspirations as varied as Sylvia Plath and Lenny Bruce, POST-Apocalyptic Valentine spans time, space, and even our galaxy in exploration of what it means to love.
PRAISE
"I have loved everything I've ever read by Linda Watanabe McFerrin. Her prose and poetry are filled with amazing women, charm, wisdom, and light. She is both soulful and precise, eloquent and full of life."
—Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird and Hallelujah, Anyway
"Some poets just bring you joy. Some poets just make you hear thoughts never thought before, with ways of saying them so new—It rocks the page. There’s heartbreak enough in POST-Apocalyptic Valentine, ecological worries too, tragedies and deaths, rough stuff for women; but Linda Watanabe McFerrin just makes you happy to read her jaunty life-giving version of it. The work is smart, sometimes sassy, and that’s the appeal. Beneath the line there’s an hydraulic of good spirit—the pleasure of making art—that seeps through. A few poems in collaboration with Erin Orison are particularly interesting, where two voices are as one; also, there’s ekphrastic poetry where you don’t even want the painting, the poem is sensual enough. This is a book to own, not only for its intelligence and emotional agility, but for so much new truth to be had. In one poem McFerrin praises Dylan Thomas, saying, 'I crawl through the belly/ of syllables…' Well, we do too, here in this book, with the deepest possible enjoyment.
—Grace Cavalieri, Maryland’s tenth Poet Laureate
"Haunted by history as well as by present ghosts, ghouls, and goblins, Watanabe’s poems are charged with the force of the great changes we’re facing—as a planet, as a society, and as individuals. And yet their ferocity is tempered with a gracious attention to the delicate details of daily life—these are poems that listen even more loudly than they speak, and that generosity gives this collection its distinctively heart-felt edge—it’s a tour de force of compassion."
—Cole Swensen, author of And And And, long-listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize
Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, novelist and travel writer Linda Watanabe McFerrin's new poetry collection navigates the spaces between depression, humor, and dark revelation. With inspirations as varied as Sylvia Plath and Lenny Bruce, POST-Apocalyptic Valentine spans time, s...
