Poems
Finalist for the 2023 Minnesota Book Award A sublimely elegant, fractured reckoning with the legacy and inheritance of suicide in one American family. In 2009, Juliet Patterson was recovering from a serious car accident when she learned her father...
Part lamentation, part ode, Threnody (the word originates from the Greek, threnos, "wailing" and oide "ode."), examines the beauty and violence of our present ecological moment with a lyric and meditative eye. Concerned with th...
"...Patterson has crafted a far reaching first book that blends self-interrogation with metaphysical inquiry. Both Patterson and Nightboat show great promise.-Publisher's Weekly "Juliet Patterson's poems are entirely themselves; they use time and the eye and tongue-all the body, as thought and insight, inside and outside history. The Truant Lover is a marvel."-Jean Valentine Spare, pastoral, intimate, and probing, these musically exacting poems offer arresting insights: "Here's a world for today: // killing & not dying / fantastically, not lying." They question, invent, refer, divert, take flying risks. They are fluid, considered, dignified. They celebrate the human eye, mind, and tongue. It is a joy to have them in print.-Olga Broumas
JULIET PATTERSON is the author of The Truant Lover, winner of the Nightboat Books Poetry Prize, and the chapbooks Epilogue and Dirge. As a community activist and artist, Patterson has worked on a number of collaborative projects related to place-making and the environment. She lives in Minneapolis with her partner and son.