Narratively compelling, culturally unique, and mythic in its scope, activist poet Patricia Nelson’s fifth collection, Monster Monologues, investigates the sharper edges of interpersonal relationships, family, loss, and transformation in a series of exciting, accessible poems that focus on our shared myths, fables, and monsters. (from John Sibley Williams)
The monsters that most of us knew only through the language of the myths had little to do with us, the human beings who read them. Some of us devoured them, even though we knew them only as timeworn interpretations. Patricia Nelson, however, has taken these myths we thought we knew well and revealed them in their ambiguous ways, their truly human versions of ourselves. We see the ancient monsters not as fabulations of Otherness but as metaphors for how we, as humans, navigate our lives.
As always with Patricia’s poems, we are invited to view our own lives through a deep recasting of the original stories, totally new retellings. Her language and mastery of poetry filled with original uses of insightful metaphor and poetic imagery raise our understanding of the monsters of myth to a new level. Monster Monologues is an important book both for its poetry and its conceptual basis of the world of myth.
Fran Claggett-Holland, author of The Shape a Wing Makes and Under the Wings of the Crow
What strikes one about Patricia Nelson’s poems is her often concise and very effective use of language. Many of her lines linger in one’s mind, and the visual aspect of her works is thoroughly engaging. The range of subjects, including Greek mythology and Shakespeare, is impressive. I highly recommend this collection for its focused intelligence and poetic vision.
Peter Thabit Jones, author of The Fathomless Tides of the Heart: A Biography of American Poet and Artist Carolyn Mary Kleefeld
From the serpentine monster with the “thumb-wide, hissing spine” to her concluding thirsty land animal, Patricia Nelson brings us a collection of poems featuring dragons, Shakespearean villains, Greek mythological figures, and other assorted characters. She carefully interrogates what lies beneath the surfaces of life. Her carefully composed, elegant stanzas and formal rhythmic diction offer a counter-ballast to her monsters, who are sometimes frightening and at other times poignant. Hers is a world curiously beautiful yet often devoid of hope, a world where the gods invented humans only to lose interest in them. These rich and brilliant poems beg to be read and re-read, their darkness carrying a visceral punch.
Susan E. Gunter, author of Dear Munificent Friends: Henry James’s Letters to Four Women
Centaurs and harpies, both mythological and human monsters, ancient philosophers and intimate narratives-Patricia Nelson populates her world with genre-dismantling characters in this series of exciting, accessible poems that explore both the strengths and frailties of the human condition in all its varied aspects. This potent work is charged with a constant state of in-betweenness, of curiosity, of never-ending continuums, all weaving a sophisticated dialectic that nourished and moved me.
John Sibley Williams, author of Skyscrape and The Drowning House
Patricia Nelson
is a former attorney who has worked for many years with the group of poets who gathered around mentor Lawrence Hart and, later, around Lawrence’s son, John Hart. The tradition of Hart mentorship has a ninety-year history. A striving for vivid imagery is one of the hallmarks of the group.