{"product_id":"subterranean-isbn-9780375709722","title":"Subterranean","description":"Jill Bialosky follows her acclaimed debut collection, \u003ci\u003eThe End of Desire\u003c\/i\u003e, with this powerful sequence of poems that probes the subterranean depths of eros. Gerald Stern has called Bialosky “the poet of the secret garden, the place, at once, of grace and sadness,” and here she enters that garden again, blending the classical with the contemporary in bold considerations of desire, fertility, virginity, and childbirth. Written against the idealizations of romantic love and motherhood, she tells of the loss of one child and the birth of another, the fierce passions of life before children, the seductions of suicide, and the comforts of art. Throughout, she braids and unbraids the distinct yet often inseparable themes of motherhood, love, and sexuality. “When he comes to me,” she writes,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003ehalf-filled glass \u003cbr\u003ein his hand, wanting \u003cbr\u003eme to touch him, I hear\u003cbr\u003eyou stir in your crib. I know what your body      \u003cbr\u003e  feels like.\u003cbr\u003eThe soft skin of a flower, not bruised, not yet\u003cbr\u003e  in torment . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003eSubterranean\u003c\/i\u003e is the moving and intimate account of the emergence of a female psyche. Like the figures of Persephone and Demeter, who appear in various forms in these poems, Bialosky finds a strange beauty in grief, and emerges from the realms of temptation with insight and distinction.\"Jill Bialosky slips Persephone's pomegranate seeds into her own poet's hand, then dives deep in \u003ci\u003eSubterranean\u003c\/i\u003e, locating fragments of girlhood and womanhood to assemble into a mythic underworld collage. If Beatrice herself were a suburban American girl who preceded Dante on his journey, these lyrics might be what she would tell us. You never get to heaven without the descent, as she, the Greek gods, and Jill Bialosky know very well--and we come to know through this alluring, surprising second volume of poems, where this poet comes into her own.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Molly Peacock\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\"These wonderful poems call to us at first with their lyric surfaces. But the music of their language is really thin ice and not far underneath is the dark, chill power of the book's true themes: sexuality, regret, the loss of children, the tainting of childhood, the nature of erotic pain. It is rare that a reader can be enchanted and endangered at the same time. This is a book of splendid and disturbing ambition.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e\u003cbr\u003e--Eavan Boland\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Bialosky takes certain essentialities--spring and winter, suffering and desire, the surface life and the sweetly subtle pull of the life below--and makes them achingly local. The poems in SUBTERRANEAN reveal one woman's psychic territory, lucidly and passionately mapped.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Kim Addonizio\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Jill Bialosky's second book of poems, SUBTERRANEAN, is an advance in psychic depth and expressive eloquence beyond her distinguished THE END OF DESIRE. Her new work fully establishes her voice: poignant, perilous, overwhelmingly aware of the extent to which our lives, inner and outer, are deflected by contingency, and by drives of love and death that govern us.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e--Harold Bloom\u003c\/b\u003eJill Bialosky was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She studied at Ohio University and received a Master of Arts from Johns Hopkins University and a Master of Fine Arts from the University of Iowa. Her first book, \u003ci\u003eThe End of Desire\u003c\/i\u003e, was published by Knopf in 1997, and her poems appear regularly in journals such as \u003ci\u003eParis Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAmerican Poetry Review\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eAgni Review\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eThe New Republic\u003c\/i\u003e. Bialosky is an editor at W. W. Norton and teaches at Columbia University; she lives in New York City with her husband and son.A Child Banishes the Darkness\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe child presides over our lives like the\u003cbr\u003eBlinding presence of tall white pines. In the\u003cbr\u003eLow room she hovers; she is the dark un-\u003cbr\u003etamed place, like a thicket in a neglect-\u003cbr\u003eed wood where I fall to after each new\u003cbr\u003eloss, the unforgotten dream buried like \u003cbr\u003ea small toy under layers of frozen\u003cbr\u003eun-raked leaves. She is the hidden secret \u003cbr\u003ewe don’t talk about because there is noth-\u003cbr\u003eing left to say. So much snow on the roofs\u003cbr\u003eof tall buildings, along the cobbled streets,\u003cbr\u003ein the eaves, and on the narrow bridge and\u003cbr\u003ein the quiet palm of the newborn trees.\u003cbr\u003eNothing left to fear. All the earth is calm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSubterranean\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe did not know when it would happen\u003cbr\u003eor how it would overtake her\u003cbr\u003eor whether she would allow herself.\u003cbr\u003eAll I know is that she could not take it anymore\u003cbr\u003elying day after day underneath the hollow tree, waiting,\u003cbr\u003econsumed by a kind of fire,\u003cbr\u003ewondering if there is a type of love\u003cbr\u003ethat saves us or whether there was more\u003cbr\u003eto the world than the familiar paradise\u003cbr\u003eof her mother's complicated and vivid garden.\u003cbr\u003eShe smelled nectar in the labored-over\u003cbr\u003echrysanthemum and amaryllis,\u003cbr\u003ebut could not taste it.\u003cbr\u003eI know if it were a flower it would have bloomed\u003cbr\u003ein the cumulus overhead\u003cbr\u003evoid of volition and sin,\u003cbr\u003etranslucent as the filmy underside of a leaf.\u003cbr\u003eIf it were an animal she would have followed it,\u003cbr\u003ebut it was amorphous as feeling, weightless as dust,\u003cbr\u003eturbulent as an entire undisclosed universe\u003cbr\u003eradiating from the inner core beneath the earth\u003cbr\u003eand, still, she longed for it.\u003cbr\u003eRestless, she wandered from the elm\u003cbr\u003eto the school-yard to smother an intensity\u003cbr\u003eshe could not squelch or simmer.\u003cbr\u003eThe wind swooned. Cement cracked. Deep into the underbelly\u003cbr\u003elight traveled, no one in sight but his immense shadow,\u003cbr\u003eand then a figure appeared out of the imagined dream\u003cbr\u003eand matched it. So powerful, not for who he was\u003cbr\u003ebut for how her mind had magnified him\u003cbr\u003elike a bug underneath cool glass,\u003cbr\u003eevery antenna and tentacle aquiver.\u003cbr\u003eNo sign of where she had been\u003cbr\u003eor who she came from. Only knowledge\u003cbr\u003ethat it would never be re-created\u003cbr\u003eexcept by this: putting words down on a page\u003cbr\u003eand that she had forever compromised\u003cbr\u003ethe joy of summer for a dismal, endless winter.\u003cbr\u003eAnd as the field of force gathered,\u003cbr\u003eraping every last silvery bough,\u003cbr\u003etantalizing each limb,\u003cbr\u003eshe forgot even the feel of herself.\u003cbr\u003eWhen it was over she felt moisture. 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