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About
A revelatory collection of poems set in the Gulf South, Carolyn Hembree's For Today chronicles the experience of a woman who becomes a mother shortly after her father's death and struggles to raise her child amid private and public turmoil. Written in closed and nonce forms that give way to the field composition of the maximalist title poem, the work explores grief, rage, and love in a community vulnerable to Anthropocene climate disasters. Through relationships with her daughter, neighbors, friends, ancestors, other poets (living and dead), and the earth, the speaker is freed to accept and celebrate her own perishability.
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Reviews
"Carolyn Hembree's For Today is a wild ride of formal innovation, odes, and elegies. Any reader would be taken with the poet's modified sonnet crown, her villanelle, her prose poems, and the musical opus that is the gorgeously long title poem. But I am most impressed by how Hembree manages all of this while also daring to write a poetry so sharp and bare it aims at nothing but the heart."
Jericho Brown, author of The Tradition
"Startling poems. A wondrous recreation of form."
Toi Derricotte, author of I: New and Selected Poems
"A high-voltage talent, Hembree harnesses the fevered elements of what's given-fraught landscape, fraught heart-because to do otherwise is to live (and write) a lie that denies love its innately fuguelike truth. These poems spun my reading swiftly into awe."
Katie Ford, author of Colosseum
Extended Details
- SeriesBarataria Poetry