Cold Pastoral Named a Midwest Booksellers Choice Awards Finalist
“Each year, our booksellers celebrate their favorite books of the year that pertain to our region. Our awards are a reflection of handselling at its best, as all the books are selected directly by independent booksellers.”
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“Exciting Poetry for Spring: 13 Highly Recommended Titles That Will Shock You Awake”
“From chickens with clipped mouths and bound feet (“I thought/ I knew cages, knew boxes”) to a doll caught in a branch (“She could be dead. Easily// she could be your daughter”), Dunham shows us a natural world damaged by humans, who also damage themselves.” Library Journal
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Interview with The Cloudy House: The Poetics of Building a Book Project
“I frequently write poetic sequences, however, and there are many of these in the book. Within a sequence, I don’t generally expect the sections to stand alone. This seems to be a case of having my cake and eating it, too.” The Cloudy House
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Interview with Amanda-Elizabeth Abend of Wanderer
“As I worked, however, I found myself writing more and more about the human costs, and about the dangers of forgetting in the aftermath of a crisis. We have short memories, especially when it comes to things that pain us, and I wanted to counter that tendency.” Wanderer
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“28 Breathtaking Poetry Books to Read Now”
Thanks to Lorraine Berry for including Cold Pastoral in this list of amazing books on Signature!
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“Women Poets Who Challenge Boundaries”
Julie Hale writes for BookPage that “Filled with images of desolate beauty, Cold Pastoral does the important work of bearing witness.”
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“Rootless Places”
A capsule review of Cold Pastoral in Jacket2.
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Interview with 30 North
“In each book, I push myself to tackle new challenges, not just content-wise but in terms of developing my craft. This always leaves me with a difficult gap of time between books, a period in which I am writing—I am always writing something—a lot of poems that never find their way into a book.” 30 N
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“25 Protest Poetry Collections to Read Right Now”
I’m honored and amazed to see Cold Pastoral show up amid so many vital collections on this list. E.CE Miller writes: “As one of the most anticipated (and most needed, IMO) poetry collections of 2017, Rebecca Dunham’s Cold Pastoral (available March 14) examines the man-made and/or human-influenced natural disasters of our time: the explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig, Hurricane Katrina and its devastating aftermath, and the Flint water crisis. Dunham’s writing is edgy, powerful, and transformative, and she blends interviews and excerpts from government documents with pastoral poetic traditions.”
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“15 of the Most Anticipated Poetry Collections of 2017”
Bustle recommends Cold Pastoral, as well as 14 other amazing books I can’t wait to get my hands on, in this list!
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“40 New Feminist Classics You Should Read”
Emily Temple includes The Flight Cage on LitHub’s “Reading List for Sticking It to Mike Pence.” Temple writes: “In this collection, Dunham calls upon classic feminist literary influences—Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Daphne de Maurier—to help her grapple with the contemporary experience of womanhood in sometimes lovely, sometimes gutting verse.
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AWP 2017
I’ll be signing books and reading from Cold Pastoral at the Milkweed Editions Reading Panel. Stop by and say hi!
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Cold Pastoral
Cold Pastoral will be published by Milkweed Editions in early 2017.
The collection explores contemporary environmental crises and received support via a Sustainable Arts Fellowship and Vermont Studio Center residency, a UW-Milwaukee Research Growth Initiative grant, as well as through a Center for 21st Century Studies Fellowship. This support provided me with time to write the poems, as well as the resources to travel to the Gulf Region and research the impact of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its aftermath first hand. These interviews and notes form a significant portion of the collection’s documentary poems. Individual poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in The Journal, Hawaii Pacific Review, The Rumpus, Cutthroat Journal, The Rumpus, Pembroke Magazine, Verse Wisconsin, and West Branch.
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In May 2016, I’ll be at the Vermont Studio Center for a month-long residency. Receiving the James Merrill Fellowship is making it possible–thank you, VSC!
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Glass Armonica was recognized by the Wisconsin Library Association with a 2013 Outstanding Achievement in Poetry Award.
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New reviews of Glass Armonica can be found at Barn Owl Review and American Microreviews and Interviews. Thanks to Sarah Dravec and Tyler Mills for reviewing the book!
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I’ve officially accepted the Arts and Sciences Distinguished Visiting Writer position for Spring 2015 at Bowling Green State University. I’ll be in residence and teaching two courses for the semester.
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Review of Glass Armonica by Timothy Otte is up at hazel & wren, on “what we’re reading.”
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A brief interview on winning the 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize with Poets & Writers. And there’s another interview with Forthcoming Poets you can check out.
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The first review of Glass Armonica is up at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel! Thank you to Jim Higgins for the review.
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Another thank you — two poems, “Tableaux Vivants” and “Wedding at Cana” were accepted by FIELD. I love FIELD, and it’s wonderful to have more poems from my book-in-progress coming out in such a great journal.
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So excited to have received a Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center for this coming spring. If you are a poet and have young children, check out this fellowship. It is amazing!
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Thank you to the editors of The Southern Review for accepting my poem “Whetstone” for a future issue!
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Press Announcement: Glass Armonica wins Milkweed Editions’ 2013 Lindquist & Vennum Prize.
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Danielle Pafunda selected my poem, “Glass Armonica,” as winner of the 2013 So to Speak Poetry Prize. You can see the poem here, and a blog post about its genesis here.
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Prime Number Magazine has a review of The Flight Cage up in their newest issue. Thank you to Paul David Adkins for the review!
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A review of The Flight Cage is up on The Rumpus! Thank you to Saara Raappana.
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Louisa Diodato reviews The Flight Cage in Devil’s Lake.
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“Elegy for the Eleven” received second place in the 2012 Joy Harjo Poetry Contest.
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Linda Aschbrenner’s review of The Flight Cage in Verse Wisconsin.