The Rabbits Could Sing

by Amber Flora Thomas

Overview

The poems included in The Rabbits Could Sing delve farther into territory that Amber Flora Thomas visited in her prize-winning book Eye of Water, showing even more clearly how “the seam has been pulled so far open on the past” that “the dress will never close.” Here, the poem acts not as a body in itself but as a garb drawn around the here and now. Loss, longing, and violation are sustenance to a spirit jarred from its animal flesh and torn apart, unsettling the reader with surprising images that are difficult to forget. The poems in The Rabbits Could Sing invite the reader into a world thick with the lush bounty of summer in the far north, where the present is never far from the shadow of the past.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781602231603
Publisher:	University of Alaska Press
Publication date:	02/15/2012
Series:	The Alaska Literary Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	66
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Amber Flora Thomas is the author of Eye of Water: Poems, and her poems have appeared in Callao, Orion Magazine, Alaska Quarterly Review, American Literary Review, Southern Poetry Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among other publications.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

I
    In August
    Swarm
    To a Reader
    The Chipped Bowl
    Take Off the Yellow Slicker
    Three Windows
    Migraine Confessional
    When You Rise You Do Not Drown
    Serenade
    Woman on Shore
    Penny’s Gallon
    Summer Mold
II
    Listen
    Conversation with the Sculptor
    Self-Portrait in the Tide
    Come in from the Sky
    Black Dog
    Killing the Rabbit: Ars Poetica
    Thinking in Front of a Mirror
    Era of a Happy Heart
    Biology Lesson
    Here
    More Light Because Her Shadow Shook
    In the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum
    Membrane
    After
    Braid
III
    Dear Reader
    Then You Fled the Room
    Heart with Interior View
    Two Horses
    Hood
    The Killed Rabbit
    Inside the Pleiades
    Spider
    Bull Frog
    Unattended
    Sometimes Oranges
    Regarding Mercy
IV
    Prayer Found in Water Pouring Down a Bus Window
    Ultrasound Aubade
    Cavity in the Rubenesque Façade
    April Spill-Off
    Parenting the Void
    Magician
    Bird Leaving a Branch
    Meditation on Four West
    From Her Lips to God’s Ears
    Sunbathing
    Girl in the Woods
    Hare in My Garden
    Pelvis with the Distance
    The Get Away

Biographical Note

Editorial Reviews

With The Rabbits Could Sing, Amber Flora Thomas continues her upward arc in the world of poetry. . . Readers of modern poetry and lovers of nature should find much to enjoy in this collection, wherein the rabbits sing, and they sing beautifully.”

ForeWord Reviews

Thomas has such a fine eye for details that even the ordinary task of carrying shopping bags into the house is made marvelous by her attention to the heft of groceries. . . . . The redeeming fact Thomas comes back to time and time again is that our life is ours and it is made better by the attention it can be paid.”

Eloise Klein Healy