Overview

Each poem in What Word for This explores a word from another language that expresses something we have no term for in English. Certainly language shapes our experience even as it attempts to express it. In these luminous poems, Marion Boyer explores myriad human experiences of time, space, memory, longing, and the ineffable.

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Reviews

In this luminous, brilliant collection, the writer journeys into the vast universe of language, with its magic, possibilities and limitations. Each poem explores a word in a different, known language, asking readers to consider universal questions of grief, memory, longing and the unknown. With poem titles that include words from languages such as Norwegian, Japanese and Italian, the writer asks readers to consider what language can teach us about ourselves and each other, as well as how an anthropology of semantics may offer us a way to explore important questions about the human experience. -Joan Kwon Glass, is the author of Night Swim

Author Information

Boyer is a Communication professor emerita from Kalamazoo Valley Community College. Her book, Ice Hours, was selected for the 2021 Wheelbarrow Books Poetry Prize, and was released in 2023. Boyer is also the author of The Sea Was Never Far (Main Street Rag, 2019) and the Clock of the Long Now (Mayapple Press, 2009). She is a two-time winner of the Grayson Books Chapbook Contest her collection Composing the Rain won and was published in 2014.

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