The Geographic Cure: Poems (Stahlecker Series Selection)

Poetry. "Another time, another day, another continent perhaps and life would be better, lovers happier, the dead un-dead" is the sought-after "geographic cure" in the title of Vermont poet Ellen Dudley's powerful second book. Traveling through North America, into South America, and to the islands of the Philippines, these visceral poems present landscapes and habitats with verve and perception. Equally vivid are the people and animals who occupy these worlds, and the relationships they travel into. Dudley writes of sex and power, lust and violence, with a stunning capacity for lyric poignancy together with stark detail, depicting women forced to endure the thrusting of intercourse as well as women longing for the taste and "heady slipstream" of men. As much as this collection delves into relationships, "the easy way / desire arcs across space" (or doesn't), these poems also explore terrain, topography. Everywhere there are reminders of "earth doing what it does / despite us. Despite": volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, floods. Survival is a habit by no means guaranteed, and THE GEOGRAPHIC CURE immerses us into our world and its inhabitants as a means of experiencing it vitally--the heartache and the excitement--in the interim.

ELLEN DUDLEY is the author of Slow Burn (1997). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Agni, Massachusetts Review, Phoebe, The Poetry Miscellany, and TriQuarterly, among other magazines. She is the winner of a Vermont Council on the Arts Fellowship and fellowships to the Dorland Mountain Arts Colony and the Vermont Studio Center. She is founding editor/publisher of The Marlboro Review. She lives in Marlboro, Vermont.