Synopses & Reviews
One Sun Storm uses a diverse variety forms, including image-driven diaries, long poems, and nursery rhyme, that interplay and echo each other throughout the experience of the book. The effect is of a central obsession or storm, in which cultural, spiritual, political and personal subjects--including the idea of the West, the presence of war, language, love¬¬--are elucidated simultaneously, implicit or interwoven with lyrical statements, images, questions, and iterations. One Sun Storm explores repetition and reiteration as a process of engaging experience, and perceptions at times bleed over into the surreal in their metamorphosis, in images of dogs on their heads or trees turning blue. The world burns with the imagination, yet Hartigan never gives up the desire for, and drive towards, the clearest and most present accounting she can make. This is poetry of immersion bringing the reader to the edge of experience in all its frailties.
Review
"Endi Bogue Hartigan's poems are enveloping: one is immersed in experiences of ice drifts, orange
peels, and the striving toward a clarity (Let us be clear, one poem reiterates) that crystallizes and
then evaporates. Subjects and objects are beautifully combined and confused through repetitions
both musical and mysterious; each separate thing helps to form the existence of another. A reader
is drawn into a process of thinking--a kind of sifting and sorting--ambitious for the large world
that is always beyond one's grasp. One Sun Storm is not a mere collection, but a total project in
which each poem is part of the whole. The passing by of the pieces of this created world engenders
gratitude and awe."
-- Martha Ronk, final judge and author of Vertigo, In a Landscape of Having to Repeat, and Why/Why Not
"Here is a vision of, a vision in, rather than a vision beyond the world, a poetry whose accuracy is
humbly undercut by the recognition that the world is always larger than the poem. Here is a poetry
whose faith is in something not merely itself. The world is experiential before it is textual. In between those two points, Hartigan's poems do their work, ensuring that what has been seen once, in its
singular wonder, remains to be seen again. The page pushes its root down into the world, into the
fact of the world, the fact that the world is--and that fact has a sheen, has a music. Hartigan hears
that music. She hears it, and she lets the facts sing their terrestrial song."
-- Dan Beachy-Quick, author of A Whaler's Dictionary, Mulberry, Spell, and North True South Bright
Review
"...these poems are intricate and phrenic: to do, at once, with the mind and the heart. They deservedly won the Colorado Prize for Poetry in 2008."
-Ailbhe Darcy, Rambles.NET
"...these poems are "gifts of the Spirit" for Hartigan and fo
Review
"More interested in the generative possibilities of questions than in their answers, the well-crafted, rangy free-verse lyrics of Hartigan's Colorado Prize-winning debut obliquely interrogate humanity's relationships with larger forces, both natural and m
Review
"Here is a vision of, a vision in, rather than a vision beyond the world, a poetry whose accuracy is humbly undercut by the recognition that the world is always larger than the poem. Here is a poetry whose faith is in something not merely itself. The worl
Review
"Here is a vision of, a vision in, rather than a vision beyond the world, a poetry whose accuracy is humbly undercut by the recognition that the world is always larger than the poem. Here is a poetry whose faith is in something not merely itself. The world is experiential before it is textual. In between those two points, Hartigan's poems do their work, ensuring that what has been seen once, in its singular wonder, remains to be seen again. The page pushes its root down into the world, into the fact of the world, the fact that the world is —and that fact has a sheen, has a music. Hartigan hears that music. She hears it, and she lets the facts sing their terrestrial song."
—Dan Beachy-Quick, author of A Whaler's Dictionary, Mulberry, Spell, and North True South Bright
Review
"More interested in the generative possibilities of questions than in their answers, the well-crafted, rangy free-verse lyrics of Hartigan's Colorado Prize-winning debut obliquely interrogate humanity's relationships with larger forces, both natural and man-made, as well as notions of love and motherhood... Hartigan distinguishes herself from her peers—she shares with many young poets a hip penchant for fragmentation and elliptical imagery—with her careful eye ('Wood chips/ burning/ by the pharmacy'), her ear for the ways soft and sharp sounds make music together ('one leaf from among/ the accumulate of leaves'), and her earnest search for 'One voice rising and falling in one chorus.'"
—Publisher's Weekly
Review
"... it finds revelation at the moment of becoming, which occurs and then, just as suddenly, is gone, replaced by another becoming. Hartigan's poems, particularly the sequences, are recombinant organisms, becoming and becoming again, like double helixes evolving into eyes and ears and skin."
—Andy Frazee, VERSE
Synopsis
Winner of the 2008 Colorado Prize for Poetry
Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
About the Author
Endi Bogue Hartigan's work has appeared in Chicago Review, Free Verse, Quarterly West, TinFish, Gulf Coast, New Orleans Review, Insurance, LVNG, The Antioch Review, Northwest Reveiw, as well as other magazines and an anthology. She cofounded and edited Spectaculem, a magazine devoted to long poems and series, for several years. A graduate of Reed College and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, Hartigan has lived primarily on the West Coast and in Hawaii, and now works and lives in Portland, Oregon, with her husband and son.