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    Sweet Gothic
    Sweet Gothic
    Sweet Gothic
    Ebook77 pages30 minutes

    Sweet Gothic

    By Colette Tennant

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The poems in Sweet Gothic weave together themes of adoption, motherhood, yearning, family, and teaching in an intricate pattern that might leave one quivering, as one reviewer attests. As the title Sweet Gothic infers, the book is filled with binaries: light and dark, life and death, lost and found, known and unknown, music and silence.

    The poem "In Between" suggests we all live somewhere in the middle. This poetry collection negotiates that middle ground. Like her necklace-making ancestor celebrated in the last poem of the book, Tennant strings together these images and narratives in a way that celebrates the power of art and helps us find our place in the midst of the contradictions around us.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResource Publications
    Release dateNov 7, 2023
    ISBN9798385200818
    Sweet Gothic
    Author

    Colette Tennant

    Colette Tennant is an English professor in Oregon. She has two previous books of poetry: Commotion of Wings (2010) and Eden and After (2015). Her Religion in The Handmaid’s Tale: A Brief Guide was published in September 2019 to coincide with publication of The Testaments. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Prairie Schooner, Rattle, and Poetry Ireland Review.

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      Book preview

      Sweet Gothic - Colette Tennant

      Sweet Gothic

      Colette Tennant

      Sweet Gothic

      Copyright ©

      2023

      Colette Tennant. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers,

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      , Eugene, OR

      97401

      .

      Resource Publications

      An Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers

      199

      W.

      8

      th Ave., Suite

      3

      Eugene, OR

      97401

      www.wipfandstock.com

      paperback isbn: 979-8-3852-0079-5

      hardcover isbn: 979-8-3852-0080-1

      ebook isbn: 979-8-3852-0081-8

      10/02/23

      Table of Contents

      Title Page

      Visitations

      Rehearsals

      At My Mother’s Funeral, My Cousin Tells Me I Have a Sister

      What This Semester’s Student Papers Taught Me about Fragile Things

      Patron Saints for My Students

      An Extra

      Marrowstone Moon

      Visitation

      Mongolian Spot

      The Hummingbird and My Birth Mother

      Questions I’m Tempted to Ask My Student Poets

      The Forgotten

      Things I Should Never Tell My Students

      Black Monday Thief

      Across the Sky

      I Buried My Father

      To Géricault’s Insane Woman

      The Rest

      My Jazz Piano Teacher in Heaven

      Synesthesia

      Undaunted

      Across the Sky

      Daytona Beach and then the Fall

      Night Sister

      Canonized

      Oh Elvis, Oh Loretta

      Conundrum

      Tracks

      Looking for Icarus

      Thankful I Find Her Anyway

      What Matters

      The Daughter I Didn’t Have

      A Woman Gave Birth to a Mouse

      Aubade—Minus Tide with My Young Grandson

      Teaching English at the Old Tuberculosis Hospital

      The Antagonist

      Permanent Colors

      Dies Natalis

      St. Valentine, Martyr, Buried on the Flaminian Gate

      Wild Wings Minor

      Curtains

      My Birth Mother and Me

      Every Interaction I’ve Had with the Moon

      One Night

      Kind of Sorry

      In Between

      I Wonder if Fortune Tellers

      Away and Maybe Wandering

      Piano Playing Increases Neuroplasticity, Multitasking, Happiness

      After Dionysus

      I Love My Eyebrows

      My Great-Grandfather was a Furniture Maker and an Undertaker

      Superlative Confession

      What She Could Find

      Acknowledgments

      The feeling, the announcement sent through me, was something stronger than was consistent with joy – something that smote and stunned: it was, I think, almost fear.

      Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

      The cellar indeed, was filled with crazy lumber.

      Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

      Visitations

      Rehearsals

      1

      My ten-year-old and I trudged ahead of my dying mother.

      It was summer, the St. Paul Independence Day Rodeo,

      and I should have waited, should have held her hand

      all the way from the car to the rough benches,

      should have held her hand from barrel

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