About Barbara Ungar
Ungar is also the author of Charlotte Brontë, You Ruined My Life; Thrift; and The Origin of the Milky Way, which won the Gival Press Poetry Award, a Silver Independent Publishers’ Award, a Hoffer Award, and the Adirondack Center for Writing Poetry Award. She is the author of the chapbooks Sequel and Neoclassical Barbra, as well as Haiku in English. She has published poems in journals such as Rattle, Salmagundi, and The Nervous Breakdown. A professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, she directs the MFA program there.
Praise for Immortal Medusa
“A strange and exciting book that takes in so much about the physical world and sends up a flare now and then from somewhere spiritual and more mysterious. What I admired most about these poems was how their meanings so influenced their form on the page, so that by the end, I realized—the way it is with any collection of value—that this is a book about how to see.”
—Michael Klein
“In Immortal Medusa, we find Matryoshka dolls, a Mobius strip, the snake with a head at both ends—figures for Barbara Ungar’s attention continually unfolding with urgency and compassion. We find the poet’s voice beguiling, a mixture of willfulness and forbearance. And we find ourselves entangled in its tender involutions and evolutions of thought. ‘The dead live on in us,’ writes Ungar. They are ‘telescoped within’ like the very elegiac mood that courses through these lines, enlivening them with wisdom. Like any great seeker, Ungar pursues the truth beneath surfaces available to the naked eye. Reading these poems, we are seized by the worlds she reveals. It is the feeling we call ravishment.”
—Gregory Pardlo
“Immortal Medusa is an elegy to dead friends and fathers, lost hats and porcupines, long-gone whales and Apache warriors. In spare, meditative poems, Barbara Ungar paints unforgettable images—water-spider shoes, sepia knickers and a shining white shirt, the near-endangered Waccamaw fatmucket and Ozark hellbender—that leave us ‘chanting to the sky’ then diving to see what we ‘can retrieve / from the deep floor where / pearls are formed in secret.’”
—Meg Kearney
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