Synopses & Reviews
Winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Award (2013)
From intimate meditations on birthing, motherhood, and parenting in a time of war to its explorations of the frank and grave matters surrounding a life lived while a lover is off fighting a war, these lush poems of the human interior always put themselves in harm s way, for there the poet finds the truest meanings. Sweet Insurgent, winner of the Alice Fay di Castagnola Prize, is a book of vivid and crushing lyric poems, each one landing like a mortar to the earth.
Review
"...Fenton has the rare fortitude and heart and willingness to really absorb and grapple with news from both near and far, and with exacting intelligence and deep knowledge of history and myth. Sweet Insurgent reminds us that the difficult is not impossible...." Mary Szybist
Review
"Elyse Fenton writes such musically nervous, muscular, formally adept poems. They inhabit a familiar world of war, mortality, an unsettled natural landscape—but filtered through an uneasy mind, quick to identify the double standard, the complexity beneath the comforting narratives we tell ourselves. These poems are alive to our historical moment, inspiring us to re-think our place in a constantly shifting political, natural, and ethical world." Kevin Prufer
About the Author
Elyse Fenton is the author of Sweet Insurgent (Saturnalia Books, 2017), which received the Poetry Society of America’s Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award as a manuscript-in-progress, and Clamor (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010), selected by D.A. Powell as winner of the 2009 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Winner of the 2008 Pablo Neruda Award from Nimrod International Literary Journal, her poetry and nonfiction have also appeared in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Bat City Review, The Massachusetts Review, and The New York Times. In 2010, she received the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize for Clamor.
Born and raised in Brookline, Massachusetts, Elyse Fenton received her B.A. from Reed College and her M.F.A. from the University of Oregon. She has worked in the woods, on farms, and in schools in New England, the Pacific Northwest, Mongolia, and Texas.
She currently lives in Portland, Oregon