Borrowed Tales

In Borrowed Tales, personae congregate to live out their lives: Hamlet and Ophelia join the McGuffey Reader's droll schoolchildren to stand beside Junius, a deaf-mute black man from the early 1900s. When they entwine with Vince, a truculent middleschooler in south L.A, and Elaine, a returned Peace Corps Volunteer weighing in from Azerbaijan, their pasts seed a tangible present. Their lives, intractably immersed in history, release chance possibilities buried in every tale. Poems burst forth like entangled weeds in a camellia bush.

"Deborah Woodard's Borrowed Tales are novelistic, negotiating numerous twists and turns that are inventive and believable, playful and magical, but always rueful. Every tale here is earned. Poetry and prose converge, unearthing a voice at work that challenges the reader. Borrowed Tales is unique, personal, and luminous." Yusef Komunyakaa

"Deborah Woodard's voice is unmistakable. Her newest work, Borrowed Tales, glints with eerie repetitions and frank, funny, masterful language. The lines in this book can blindside: 'My eyes were like lumps of food in my throat,' '...the girls came like gulls that married telephone poles.' The collection is a remarkable ride." Stacey Levine

"In these Tales the marvelous surfaces as a stuttering honesty, intent on Sanka granules, Rust-Oleum, 'the umbilical impasse of the buds,' and 'a heap of living creatures, glued like balsa.' Shapely, idiosyncratic sentences appear one after another 'like snowflakes frozen singly on the pane.' But step back and they fall together into paragraphs faithful to the multiply-exposed nostalgia of anybody's borrowed tales." Sam Lohmann

Deborah Woodard was born in New York City and raised in Vermont. She holds an MFA from the University of California at Irvine and a PhD from the University of Washington. Her first full-length poetry collection is Plato's Bad Horse (Bear Star Press, 2006). She is the author of three chapbooks, most recently Hunter Mnemonics (hemel press, 2008), which was illustrated by artist Heide Hinrichs. Her translation from the Italian of Amelia Rosselli, The Dragonfly: A Selection of Poems 1953-1981, was published by Chelsea Editions (2009). She teaches hybrid creative writing and literature classes at the Richard Hugo House, a literary writing center in Seattle, Washington.