Overview

Playful love poems to kids, coral reefs, and crows_x000D_ _x000D_ Winner of the 2024 Cardinal Poetry Prize_x000D_ _x000D_ Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem is the inaugural winner of the Cardinal Poetry Prize, selected by renowned poet Robert Pinsky. In free verse and invented poetic forms, Rachel Trousdale explores how the interplay between the mind and body illuminates our most important relationships, whether with other humans, wild spaces, or works of art. Inhabited by crows, yetis, coral reefs, and aliens, these poems playfully examine the intensity and conflict of romantic love; the entropic joys of parenthood; illness and grief; and the ways our physical loves and intangible losses teach us responsibility to the world around us. _x000D_ _x000D_ [Sample Poem]_x000D_ _x000D_ Love Poem With Dereliction of Duty_x000D_ _x000D_ It's true—I like you more than I like_x000D_ the Marquis de Sade; God that_x000D_ mid-April afternoon in 1995,_x000D_ when I said, ""let's take a walk""_x000D_ and you said ""sure"" and we circled_x000D_ the New Haven Green saying_x000D_ who the hell knows what_x000D_ because if we had seen_x000D_ all this falling in love stuff coming, we_x000D_ would have paid more attention;_x000D_ I just know it took two hours,_x000D_ past the churches and the porn shop_x000D_ and over to the cemetery with all_x000D_ those skull-topped slabs leaning_x000D_ memorially against the brownstone wall;_x000D_ round and round we went like marbles_x000D_ dodging the traps in a game_x000D_ of labyrinth; and finally back_x000D_ to campus through that big stone gate_x000D_ which we entered just as the prof_x000D_ of the philosophy class I was skipping_x000D_ came out and I said oh the pain_x000D_ the pain I can't take it any more_x000D_ and doubled up laughing

Full Product Details

Author:   Rachel Trousdale
Publisher:   Wesleyan University Press
Imprint:   Wesleyan University Press
ISBN:  

9780819501851

ISBN 10:   0819501859
Pages:   72
Publication Date:   15 April 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Available To Order  
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Table of Contents

I. Introduction Five-Paragraph Essay on the Body-Mind Problem The Reef Optics Lab Variations on a Theme by Oscar Wilde How to Survive a Wildfire II. First Body Paragraph Love Poem With Dereliction of Duty Your Airplane Invisible Mice Furnishing Self Portrait as Noble Pen Shell I Swear This Is Not Intended as a Back-Handed Compliment Lost in the Woods Love Poem With Boojum Love Poem With Naratriptan Units of Measure III. Second Body Paragraph Bubble Entropy Avalanche Conditions For a Child Drowned Off Lesbos Our Colt Syllabus Collection How to Face Your Own Mortality and That of Your Loved Ones Parental Authority is a Myth Like Any Other Myth Hands IV. Third Body Paragraph A Long List of Small Mercies Slope Carboniferous The Alien Observer Gets Worried Hill Country Call When You Get There The Migraine Dear Ilsabil, Night Shift, Summer, 1994 The Pyramid V. Conclusion Narrative of the Tribal Bard Steeple The Second Baby Explains the Unthinkable Old Joke Packing List

Reviews

"""A rare gift in art is directness: to turn a clear, unsentimental gaze on love and grief in all their variations, with no smokey or mysterioso evasions. Almost as valuable is meaningful surprise, the stunned laughter of recognition even if the subject for marvel is loss. The heartfelt, unpredictable poems of Rachel Trousdale attain that kind of discovery.""--Robert Pinsky, Judge, 2024 Cardinal Poetry Prize"

"""A rare gift in art is directness: to turn a clear, unsentimental gaze on love and grief in all their variations, with no smokey or mysterioso evasions. Almost as valuable is meaningful surprise, the stunned laughter of recognition even if the subject for marvel is loss. The heartfelt, unpredictable poems of Rachel Trousdale attain that kind of discovery.""--"

Author Information

RACHEL TROUSDALE is a professor of English at Framingham State University. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The Yale Review, Diagram, and other journals, as well as a chapbook, Antiphonal Fugue for Marx Brothers, Elephant, and Slide Trombone (2015). Her scholarly work includes Humor, Empathy, and Community in Twentieth-Century American Poetry (2021) and Nabokov, Rushdie, and the Transnational Imagination (2010).

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