The Woman Who Married Herself

Donna Spector

Evening Street Press, 2010 - Poetry - 93 pages

A Sinclair Poetry Prize Finalist "Break us," says Donna Spector, "and love pours out." In The Woman Who Married Herself,poetry pours out as well,in poems of heartbreak and nostalgia, irony and laughter, reverie and acuity. This is a poetry that probes at life, discovering in the dramatic encounters with the past and present a knowledge of the world and of oneself that deepens and enriches our lives, too, marrying sensitivity with intelligence." -Paul Kane "In the Woman Who Married Herself, Donna Spector gives us the gift of honesty and specificity to create powerful and rooted poems that bring us to tears. She makes us believe we know the people she writes about, know thecomplexities of life with all its confusion and shame, love and loss. These poems teach us how to survive. You'll want to read this book again and again." - Maria Mazziotti Gillan, Winner of American Book Award, 2008 for All That Lies Between Us "Donna Spector's book is wonderful--surreal, quirky, comical, full of life. Poems of childhood and family history, lovers and longing, travel, love as a search for life. Poems about her teachers--John Berryman, Thom Gunn, Louis Simpson. The Woman Who Married Herself "[o]pened boxes of china/so fine she could hold/a plate to the light and see her own/life beyond." A perfect description of this book." -Sharon Doubiago, Love on the Streets, Selected and New Poems, My Father's Love, Portrait of the Poet as a Young Girl

Contents

• My Father Was: 1
• The Voice of the Train: 7
• All These Mothers: 13
• My Son Calls Me from Los Angeles: 19
• Reading the Bones: 33
• Could Tell Stories: 39
• When the Women Say Yes: 45

About the author

Donna Spector' is a playwright as well as a poet. Her play Golden Ladder (Women Playwrights:The Best Plays of 2002) was produced Off Broadway, as was her first play, Another Paradise, in 1986. Her plays have also appeared Off Off Broadway, regionally and in Canada, Ireland and Greece. A member of Dramatists Guild and Poets & Writers, she received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study in Greece and production grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the New York Council for the Arts. Winner of the Masters Poetry Series, three-times nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Pushcart Press Editors' book award, she has had poems, plays, stories, scenes and monologues published in many literary magazines and anthologies. A program of her poems was aired on PoeticA (Australian Broadcasting Company, in Sydney/Melbourne) in 2004. She lives in an old farmhouse across from a wildlife sanctuary in Warwick, New York.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Woman Who Married Herself
• Author: Donna Spector
• Publisher: Evening Street Press, 2010
• ISBN: 0982010559, 9780982010556
• Length: 93 pages
• Subjects: Poetry / General