{"title":"Laura Read","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cspan\u003eLaura Read was born in New York City and has lived most of her life in Spokane, WA. She is the author of \u003cem\u003eThe Serious World\u003c\/em\u003e (BOA Editions, 2025), \u003cem\u003eDresses from the Old Country\u003c\/em\u003e (BOA Editions, 2018), \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eInstructions for My Mother’s Funeral\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry), and the chapbook \u003c\/span\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cspan\u003e (winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). A recipient of a Washington State Artists Trust Grant, a Florida Review Prize for Poetry, and the Crab Creek Review Prize for Poetry, Laura presents regularly at literary festivals and conferences throughout the Northwest, including GetLit!, Write on the Sound, Litfuse, and the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Laura served as Spokane’s Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, and she currently teaches at Spokane Falls Community College. For more information about Laura Read, visit \u003ca data-auth=\"NotApplicable\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" href=\"https:\/\/lauraread.net\/\" data-linkindex=\"1\" title=\"https:\/\/lauraread.net\/\" data-olk-copy-source=\"MessageBody\" target=\"_blank\"\u003ehttps:\/\/lauraread.net\/\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/span\u003e\u003cspan\u003e.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"dresses-from-the-old-country","title":"Dresses from the Old Country","description":"\u003cp\u003eLaura Read’s second poetry collection jumps back and forth in time to illuminate the identities of a life in progress: lost child, lonely adolescent, teacher, daughter, friend, wife, mother—a woman continuously shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. With an eye on gender issues, Read looks back at her childhood in the ’70s and ’80s as she observes how popular culture is shaping her sons’ lives today.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch4\u003eFrom\u003cspan\u003e \"Vaccination\"\u003c\/span\u003e\n\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe scar on my arm is thin like the skin\u003cbr\u003eof a fruit close to splitting.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIt marks my birth as before ’72,\u003cbr\u003ebefore the end of smallpox but after polio, \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eafter the wheelchairs and the iron lungs, \u003cbr\u003ethe radios crackling with war. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIf you were born then, you remember \u003cbr\u003etaking your Halloween candy \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eto the fire station to have it checked \u003cbr\u003efor razor blades. Maybe there was one \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eblack girl in your class like Martha Washington\u003cbr\u003ewho brought upside-down clown cones \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003efor her birthday and then moved away. \u003cbr\u003eYou watched the Challenger blow up \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eon the news again and again. \u003cbr\u003eI was there in my boots and eyeliner, \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ewaiting by the wall until a boy \u003cbr\u003easked me to dance.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch4\u003ePraise for \u003cem\u003eDresses from the Old Country\u003c\/em\u003e\n\u003c\/h4\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"No one can deliver a deadly and disarmingly frank line like Laura Read, whose nostalgia and memory for high school jobs at Taco Time and green eyeliner and childhood (her own and her sons’) and learning (her own and her students’) is as barbed as it is brilliant. This is one of the most beautiful and wickedly true collections I’ve read in ages, and it reminded me of how rare it is to find someone who writes ‘a true sentence, the one you finally say.’\" \u003cstrong\u003e—Alexandra Teague\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\"Laura Read is one of the great love poets of our age – her love is wide and searching, generous and demanding. She offers the fullness, complexity, and yearning of a daughter’s, wife’s, mother’s, and lover’s feelings. Fully human and deeply nuanced, Read’s poems propose a vision of love that is generous, abundant, and self-sacrificing, but also these speakers will be damned if a woman offering so much of herself will be ignored or erased. This is a beautiful collection that envisions the end of muses and imagines what reciprocal and empowered devotion might make possible.\"\u003cstrong\u003e —Kathryn Nuernberger\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e“‘I knew I had to go back under,’ writes Laura Read, as she dives once again into the night-black waters of the opening poem of her second full-length collection, \u003cem\u003eDresses from the Old Country\u003c\/em\u003e. ‘Someone was down there \/ who had to be saved.’ And who drifts in depths? Who requires rescue? The dreamy, desirous girl the poet once was? The sweet, sad, sometimes wicked woman she is? An old, ridiculous boyfriend? Her son grown so suddenly into a man? I'll tell you, reader, I think it's us—you and me. Truly, I haven't been so knocked out, so heart-struck by a book of poems in a good long while. ‘No one told me this about love,’ Read writes, near the end of this astonishing collection, and I think, Me neither, me neither! Until now, at least.” \u003cstrong\u003e—Joe Wilkins, author of \u003cem\u003eThe Mountain and the Fathers\u003c\/em\u003e and \u003cem\u003eWhen We Were Birds\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e© BOA Editions, Ltd. 2018\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BOA Editions, Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":12201990651985,"sku":"978-1-942683-66-7","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/products\/Dresses_from_the_Old_Country_FC-min.jpg?v=1532521322"},{"product_id":"the-serious-world","title":"The Serious World","description":"\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Serious World \u003c\/em\u003eis a collection of epistolary poems written to Sylvia Plath about depression, therapy, friendship, family, and the struggling life of an artist.\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e \u003c\/strong\u003eWith humor, sensitivity, and deep reflection, Laura Read explores many themes including mental health, suicide, loss, feminism, motherhood, and aging, offering a fresh view of the world as seen through the feminist poet’s searching spyglass. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003eReaching back into history to talk with Plath and other historical figures who have suffered and wrote about their suffering, Read tries to make sense of what it’s like to be alive and suffering now. These deeply felt poems include language from Plath’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Bell Jar\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e \u003c\/em\u003eand poems about Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir, along with other strange bedfellows from pop culture who make appearances, among them Kenny Rogers, Dr. Seuss, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love.\u003c\/span\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003ch3 dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\n\u003cspan\u003ePraise for \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Serious World\u003c\/em\u003e\n\u003c\/h3\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Helen Vendler wrote that Sylvia Plath possessed ‘a genius for the transcription in words of those wild states of feeling which in the rest of us remain so inchoate that we quail under them, speechless.’ Laura Read’s \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Serious World\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e\u003cem\u003e \u003c\/em\u003echannels this unflinching Plathian voice—elliptical, narrative, and darkly funny. These are poems the reader instinctively trusts. ‘You have to keep going back to the rooms, \/ you have to say how you feel,’ Read writes, recognizing that to capture the explosive unfairness of life in a woman’s body, one must commit to relentless, continually evolving truth-telling. \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Serious World\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e casts these spinning plates of grief, loss, aging, and meaning-making in the air, inviting the reader to marvel at their absurdity, and daring us to laugh. These poems evoke Plath’s ‘wild states of feeling’ viscerally—dissatisfied with one reading, I dive back in to rediscover all the nuances of Read’s polyhedral mind.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Jenny Molberg, author of \u003cem\u003eThe Court of No Record \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“In long, discursive, compulsively readable poems, the kind that make me feel as though I am re-reading one of the many beloved interlocutors of this beautiful book—Plath, Melville, de Beauvoir, Duras—Laura Read opens a door to a fully-drawn world. This book may be serious with tragedy, but it is also warm with the absurd comedy we lean on to survive, and in infinite conversation with the life of the mind. I will return to \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cem\u003eThe Serious World\u003c\/em\u003e\u003cspan\u003e when I am full of yearning, or sadness, or simply want a smart, irreverent chat with a few brilliant friends.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Emily Van Duyne, author of \u003cem\u003eLoving Sylvia Plath: A Reclamation \u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp dir=\"ltr\"\u003e\u003cspan\u003e“Equally at home referencing Sylvia Plath or Courtney Love, and fluent in the languages of both Simone de Beauvoir and Madonna singing on stage in an ‘80s movie about wrestling, Laura Read can find the comic and the tragic in nearly anything, often at the same time. These are finely-crafted, nuanced poems, unafraid to ask big questions about loss and love and being a person in the world. These poems don’t aim to comfort, but to reach for meaning in their discomfort. Read asks, ‘Am I always about to say something upsetting to mothers and therapists?’ Probably. And we readers are so lucky for that.” \u003c\/span\u003e\u003cstrong\u003e—Matthew Olzmann, author of \u003cem\u003eConstellation Route\u003c\/em\u003e\u003c\/strong\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"BOA Editions, Ltd.","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47813572985061,"sku":null,"price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Paperback (Signed)","offer_id":47813573017829,"sku":null,"price":25.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Hardcover","offer_id":48052296712421,"sku":null,"price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true},{"title":"Ebook","offer_id":48134933250277,"sku":null,"price":5.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/files\/TheSeriousWorld_CVR_1200px_RGB_SM.jpg?v=1743786057"}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0982\/0178\/collections\/Laura_Read_Hi-Res_Small-min.jpg?v=1523291212","url":"https:\/\/shop.boaeditions.org\/collections\/laura-read.oembed","provider":"Boa Editions","version":"1.0","type":"link"}