Abider: Poems (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780822968375)

Equal parts sad, sexy, and searching, Abider opens with the central lament/brag of its lover-speaker, that she can never truly leave anything--or anyone--behind. The origins of this abidingness are traced in odes and elegies for a rural girlhood beset with jeopardy and scarcity and neglect. But it was also good-wild, conducive to a reckless freedom she can't help grieving, even as she falls in love at sixteen and marries hard. Meanwhile, other, electric connections are painfully delimited by heteronormative expectations, and her growing dis-ease reveals that she has been trying (and failing) to heal by remaining where she is harmed. She wants--this harrowed, semi-feral girl turned unswerving woman--to stay and go at once, and the tension between her desire for connection and her wish to escape threatens her sense of self and animates these vivid, urgent, tenderhearted poems. Right on time, then, a secret third thing emerges: a final, lush and lucid sonnet sequence that culminates in a promise to abide--first, foremost, always--the self.

Author: Melissa Crowe
ISBN-10: 0822968371
ISBN-13: 9780822968375
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Language: English
Published: 09/22/2026
Pages: 110
Format: Paperback