Medusa's Country (Poetry)
A new book of searingly intelligent poems from a uniquely eloquent poet. Gut-wrenching honesty, spiritual courage, and unflinching vision are what it takes to visit Medusa’s Country.
A new book of searingly intelligent poems from a uniquely eloquent poet. Gut-wrenching honesty, spiritual courage, and unflinching vision are what it takes to visit Medusa’s Country.
A new book of searingly intelligent poems from a uniquely eloquent poet. Gut-wrenching honesty, spiritual courage, and unflinching vision are what it takes to visit Medusa’s Country.
It’s not easy to find a guide to take you there, but Larissa Shmailo is ready for the job. She spares herself—and her reader—no pains in the search for home, drawing on the experience of her immense challenges—prostitution, alcoholism, drugs and insanity—and her immense advantages—a gift for poetic form, a razor-sharp mind, the spirit of a mystic, and a deep intimacy with world literature and culture— to share with us precious and hard-learned lessons: the necessity not only to survive but to triumph, and the crucial place of art and culture in that achievement. Brace yourself. Medusa’s Country is a book to savor, and Larissa Shmailo, novelist, translator, and poet of urgent maturity and resonant depth, is a writer to watch.
—Annie Finch, author of Spells: New and Selected Poems
Excerpt:
The Sun is hot and bothered, and libidinal, having fathered
all our mendicants and tycoons, cops and robbers, and our rife loons.
The Earth below is verdant, child of Eros, green, exultant
for solar love would bask her with his sure heat and not task her,
but treasure all her madmen, all her masters and their bondsmen,
thus offering a devotion of which our Gaia has no notion.
The fickle Earth presumes a love from solar powers as enough;
Her denizens expect the same and bask in glory with no name.
Now, the music of the spheres should play loud in one's own ears
But creation's power's assumed, and unheard by all us loons.