Seven Boxes for the Country After is a book about a way-making and way-finding. It is a journey, both internal and external, across a map, over borders, through a life, and in a body. It is passage and pilgrimage, odyssey and exile. Above all it is a book of questions. What do we carry with us and what do we leave behind? Where do we keep the past and what do we keep it in? How do we measure a person, a country, a love, a loss? What do we remember? What can’t we forget? What do we declare and what do we declare it with: our words and mouths? our bodies and hands? in blue ink or black? If as Eudora Welty wrote, ‘The memory is a living thing—it too is in transit,’ then McAdams is an honest and faithful courier. The poems serve as storage boxes into which a memory is placed, then wrapped and bound. In poem after poem McAdams guides us to our most intimate spaces, the candy tin nestled between the handkerchiefs in a dresser’s top drawer, the cigar box packed in the trunk and stored in the attic, and she allows us to open and sit with our deepest selves
Of Scottish, Irish, and Creek (Muscogee) ancestry, Janet McAdams is the author of The Island of Lost Luggage, which won the Diane Decorah First Book Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and an American Book Award in poetry. She is the author of a second collection, Feral, and a novel, Red Weather. She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of Alabama and her PhD in Comparative Literature from Emory University. She teaches at Kenyon College as the Robert P. Hubbard Professor of Poetry. Her poems have been widely published in such magazines as Poetry, the North American Review, the Kenyon Review, the Women’s Review of Books, and TriQuarterly. In 2005, she founded the award-winning Earthworks Poetry Series for Salt Publishing in the UK.
Leading publishers –Holllyridge Press, Kent State University Press and Pluto Press (2 entries each).
Leading author – Oscar Wilde (2 publications).
TOP TEN UK CHAPBOOKS
1 (2) Seven Boxes for the Country After – Janet McAdams (The Kent State University Press 30 April 2016)
2 (1) Chapbook Riddles: Reprints of Six Rare and Charming Early Juveniles – Peter Stockham (Dover Publications, 1975)
3 (3) Hard Rain – Tony Hoagland (Hollyridge Press, 20 Oct. 2005)
4 (6) Poems for Political Disaster – Timothy Donnelly, Bk Fischer, Stefania Heim and Matt Lord (Boston Review, 20 Jan. 2017)
5 (7) On Imagination – Mary Ruefle (Sarabande Books, 25 July 2017)
6 (4) Soul of Man Under Socialism – Oscar Wilde (Pluto Press, 1 Jan 1987)
7 (8) Ballad of Reading Gaol – Oscar Wilde (Pluto Press, 29 Jun 1978)
8 (9) Any Kind of Excuse – Nin Andrews (The Kent State University Press 31 Mar. 2003)
9 (10) The Stories of Eva Luna – Isabel Allende (Atheneum, 1990)
10 (5) On The Kitchen Table From Which Everything Has Been Hastily Removed – Olena Kalytiak Davis (Hollyridge Press, 1 July 2009)
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