Odessa
Subtitle: poems
By: Patricia Kirkpatrick
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Minneapolis
Language: eng
Number of pages: 82
ISBN-13: 9781571314567
Description: A grim prognosis, brain cancer, leaves the speaker in Kirkpatrick's Odessa fighting for her life. The tumor presses against her amygdalae, the "emotional core of the self," and central to the process of memory. In poems endowed with this emotional charge but void of sentimentality, Kirkpatrick sets out to recreate what was lost by fashioning a dreamlike reality. Odessa, "roof of the underworld," a refuge at once real and imagined, resembles simultaneously the Midwestern prairie and a mythical god-inhabited city. In image-packed lines bearing shades of Classical heroism, Kirkpatrick delivers a personal narrative of stunning dimension.