Overview

In this collection of poetry and personal essay, Maud Lavin crafts a generous vision of Lake Michigan, Chicago, pacifist Jewish heritage, climate science, sensuality, love, and ethics-all experienced through the senses of an ever-changing body. This book asks the question: what does it mean to live in one body for an entire lifetime? In narrative verse and image-rich realism, Lavin lifts up the self as one part of a collective, called to share the planet's water and protect it-for all our lives. 74 pages, 6"" x 8"", perfect-bound, cover art by Lucia Enriquez.

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9798991404822

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Reviews

""Swim Lessons is Maud Lavin's radiant meditation on being alive, and the radical freedom of choosing one's own strokes. Part conservation, part love letter, and part memoir, this book flows through Chicago's 57th Street Beach and beyond...""-Dipika Mukherjee, author of Dialect of Distant Harbors, Writer's Postcards, and other works""...Lavin invites us on a journey through the Midwest, and in each city, the speaker's admiration for water ripples through. Each lake that we encounter is a basin of memory, a mirror in which previous versions of the speaker float to the surface before disappearing again. Most importantly, the lakes serve as models of hunger and desire, of how to hold the people we love, of how to swallow what we want whole.""-Taylor Byas, author of Resting Bitch Face""...an ebullient, loving, plainspoken song about pleasure. Here, swimming, sex, and flying are central modes of inquiry about topics ranging from aging to bigotry, the Midwest's lush greenery and it's ""small-town small heart,"" to the body and its connection to nature....""-Thea Goodman, Author of The Invented Mother

Author Information

A Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominee, Maud Lavin has published in Reckon Review, Copihue Poetry, BRIDGE, Roi Fainéant, the Nation, Harper's Bazaar, Slate, and other venues. One of her books, CUT WITH THE KITCHEN KNIFE (Yale University Press), was named a New York Times Notable Book. Her other books include CLEAN NEW WORLD and PUSH COMES TO SHOVE (both from MIT Press) and three anthologies. Her writing has appeared in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, German, Dutch, Finnish, and Spanish as well as English. Recently, Cowboy Jamboree Press published her SILENCES, OHIO, and From Beyond Press her eco-novella MERMAIDS AND LAZY ACTIVISTS. She is a 4-H alumna and a Guggenheim Fellow.

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