Love from the Outer Bands

Love from the Outer Bands

$19.00

By Mary Block

Mary Block’s debut book of poetry, Love from the Outer Bands is a celebration of motherhood that ditches saccharine verse in favor of clear-eyed poems that belie the trope of the selfless mother. Clearly, these sharp-witted, emotionally resonant poems have a very prominent self who lays bare the weight of motherhood while dispelling the myth of the martyr. Block’s expert use of form, structure and prosody presents motherhood as construct, as commentary, as conscience, and as love, in its most concrete form. These are not sentimental poems, yet they provide succor and sustenance, the sort of lullaby everyone needs.—Caridad Moro-Gronlier, author of Tortillera

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About Mary Block

Mary Block’s poems have appeared in Mudfish, Best New Poets 2020, RHINO, Nimrod International Journal, Sonora Review, Rattle, and elsewhere. She is a graduate of NYU’s Creative Writing Program, a Best of the Net finalist and a 2012 finalist for the Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. She lives in her hometown of Miami and is an editor at SWIMM.

Praise for Love from the Outer Bands

Block invites us to consider ourselves as creator and creation; “the mother, the maker” is also a “primitive animal begging.” Block asks: What is love in this world as we slide between gradations of wonder and terror? Her tightly woven, sensorial poems linger in impermanence: our salt skin “on the edge of annihilation” surviving in the grip of Miami’s creeping vines and slithering animals, disappearing shorelines and rising waters—in a city “pulled from the sea.” Love from the Outer Bands echoes the anthem of all Floridians: “I know how to start over.”  It’s a cradle song laced with warning: “Remember, my son, / that we are all part water / part sleep.” Block wields image as machete—and her debut collection about body and land, birth and rebirth—cuts deep.—Alexandra Lytton Regalado, author of Relinquenda (National Poetry Series) and Matria

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