About Emily August
Emily August is an Associate Professor of Literature at Stockton University. Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best New Poets, her poems have appeared in Callaloo, Cimarron Review, Ninth Letter, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere.
Praise for The Punishments Must Be a School
Emily August’s gorgeous debut collection is both sculpture and scalpel. This is poetry carved from the exquisite chill of marble and the messy viscera of bodies. Her subject is the brutal spectrum of violence, from the domestic to the institutional. How does a family move past a history of abuse? Why do our institutions — the school, the medical complex, the theater — need violence to survive, and what is lost to
our rituals of obedience? —Leanna Petronella, author of The Imaginary Age
This ingenious debut never shies away from the torments inherent to colonization and education. To these pains August gives the full attention of her remedies. Like the treatments of trustworthy doctors, these poems heal without the ethers of cheap transcendence. —Michael Walsh, author of Creep Love and editor of Queer Nature
With the rigor of a scientist investigating specimens under a microscope, these exquisite, profoundly intelligent poems confront the ways inherited trauma operates in our lives. As the speaker journeys through personae she adopts for survival, keen observation provides its own kind of healing. —Lisa Dordal, author of Water Lessons and Next Time You Come Home
From their razor-sharp intelligence and wit, to their winding and inventive syntaxes, to their unflinching renderings of violence both past and present, August’s poems are loaded with slow-burn intensity that nearly ignites the page. One of the finest examples of a unified lyrical consciousness in contemporary American poetry. —Chad Abushanab, author of The Last Visit
Reviews
There are no reviews yet.