Each day we highlight one of the 36 finalists leading up to the April 8 announcement of the Minnesota Book Awards, presented by Education Minnesota. Today we feature 2017 Poetry finalist:
May Day by Gretchen Marquette
Published by: Graywolf Press
Category Sponsor: Wellington Management, Inc.
May Day is both a distress call and a celebration of the arrival of spring. In this rich and unusually assured first collection, Marquette writes of the losses of a brother gone off to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a great love that has left the world charged with absence and grief. But there is also the wonder of the natural world: the deer at the edge of the forest, the dog reliably coaxing the poet beyond herself and into the city park where by tradition every May Day is pageantry, a festival of surviving the long winter. “What does it mean to be in love?” one poem asks. “As it turns out, / the second best thing that can happen to you / is a broken heart.”
About the Author:
Gretchen Marquette’s work has appeared in The Paris Review, Harper’s, Tin House, TriQuarterly, Paper Darts and other journals. While a graduate student at Hamline University, Marquette served as the assistant poetry editor for Water~Stone Review, and has been a first reader for the National Poetry Series. She is a 2014 recipient of a Minnesota Emerging Writer Grant through the Loft Literary Center. She lives in the Powderhorn neighborhood of South Minneapolis.
Rave Reviews:
“Startlingly original. . . . Marquette’s beautiful and macabre images have the feel of a classic fairy tale.”—Star Tribune
“Lovely, dark, haunted, and haunting. . . . [Marquette’s] subjects—childhood memories of a brother and bracing visions of him on military deployment overseas; hungering, fragile love; the very nature of human experience—are so carefully handled, with such resolve and resignation. . . . Readers will remember this book.”— Publishers Weekly
“This book may touch on a lot of your standard poetry topics. Nature—mostly in the form of the totem deer—family, love and loss, but Marquette’s approach can go from somewhat oblique, with non-standard lineation and surprising imagery to the very straight on with descriptions of a hunt. We may be in the field, the living room or the dream, but we are always guided by language that sets us just slightly on edge and doesn’t let us get too comfortable.” — Minnesota Book Awards Judge
Beyond the Book
Review: “All the Furious Living and all the Furious Dying” by Tony Leuzzi, The Brooklyn Rail
Audio: “Minnesota poet Gretchen Marquette finds beauty in trying times” by Euan Kerr, MPR
Interview: Gretchen Marquette speaks with Kaveh Akbar of Divedapper