Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. In APPLIES TO ORANGES, Maureen Thorson's debut full-length collection of poems, oranges, spiders, tourists, and a Zenith television conspire to turn the conventions of narrative on its side. These poems fracture and refract narrative by crafting a story from seemingly absurd symbols whose recursive use defies coherence, but expand the imagination by gradually revealing an anachronistic, nostalgic, and cinematic world. The precision of these poems transforms a simple escapist fantasy into an internalized landscape that reveals both humor and sadness with successive repetition.
About the Author
Maureen Thorson is a poet, publisher, and book designer living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of a number of chapbooks, including Twenty Questions for the Drunken Sailor (Dusie/flynpyntar Press, 2009); Mayport (Poetry Society of America, 2006), which won the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship; and Novelty Act (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2004). Her poems can be found in many anthologies and journals, including the forthcoming Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets, EXQUISITE CORPSE, Hotel Amerika, LIT, THE HAT, and 6x6. Maureen is the publisher and editor of Big Game Books, a small press dedicated to emerging poets. She is also the co-curator of the In Your Ear reading series at the DC Arts Center and the founder of NaPoWriMo, an annual project in which poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.