Overview

Anna Zumbahlen's debut collection Surety traverses memory while attending to the landscape of northwestern Iowa during a year that brought ecopolitical tensions to the surface of daily life in a small town. These poems open the state of mind that produces lyric poetry onto questions of solitude, selfhood, place, and community in a record of generosities, violences, and contradictions. Set in acres planted with corn and soy, lined by roadsides overgrown with thistles and prairie rose, Surety maps intercounty disputes over pollution in the watershed, catalogues seasonal shifts and flora both cultivated and wild, and probes a private loss. This collection locates surety in poetry itself, and in what poetry makes legible in life and love. Anna Zumbahlen is a poet living in Southern California. She holds a PhD in English & Literary Arts from the University of Denver and an MFA from the University of Montana, where she was the recipient of the Richard Hugo Memorial Scholarship. Read recent work at www.annazum.com.

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9781955969543

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Reviews

""What kind of experience is surety? In Anna Zumbahlen's poised lyrics, it is a nuanced and cerebral wager, offering subtlety and sensation in equal measure. Against the backdrop of a year and its seasons, the poet contends with moments of animist tenderness and personal hauntings in rural landscapes and domestic spaces. Enveloped in various atmospheres of mental and physical weather, what an intent, driven, and intimate imagination these maneuvering poems portray."" -Sandra Lim ""Surety is a bee sting in the middle of the prairie, an awakening surrounded by surrender. Startling turns in language and feeling give this book an authentic strangeness that couldn't be counterfeited. The poems feel their way through the world with a delicate friction that hums with high stakes. I loved Anna Zumbahlen's voice and its claim on solitude, her wry, wise, and winning version of an American subsurface resistance. 'I had planned to control myself this year / but have instead abandoned myself to impulse.'"" -Katie Peterson ""In his essay 'Surety and Fidelity Claims', Wallace Stevens writes not about poetry, but about his job, though he might also have been writing about poetry when he describes the 'claims man' as someone who believes himself to be one with his papers, a creature 'consisting principally of hands and eyes; lots of hands and lots of eyes.' The tender and invested ways in which Surety sees and touches the world (though it must be said: poetry is not a kind of money) give rise to the powerful, meaningful presence of a person, someone willing to work with you to remake the mind and the world more livable and more abiding. Not every poet needs to-not every poet can-manage notes toward a better way of being, but I stand by my claim that Anna Zumbahlen is one who has managed, quite capably, to do that very thing."" -Graham Foust ""I would like to make a claim about grace, claim the persistence of a reasonable pattern. But there's such a thing as incorrect growth, incidental dispersal."" The certainty-and clarifying questions-held and observed in these tight, yet exploratory, poems teach us how to think about truth as central to the act of perception and self-perception. Anna Zumbahlen's brilliant Surety offers us ways of thinking through what matters-particularly what kinds of claims description can make when it trusts the landscape's dominion. It shows how a certain kind of human perception and documentation can propel a necessary social relation of grace. This is a deeply moving collection of poems."" -Prageeta Sharma

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