Mytheria (price includes shipping)
FOR INTERNATIONAL ORDERS (Canada included): Please email Two Sylvias Press ([email protected]) listing the item(s) you would like to order and quantity. We will send you an invoice with the international shipping amount. By Molly Tenenbaum (Two Sylvias Press, 2017)
Mytheria is the finalist for the Two Sylvias Press Wilder Series Poetry Book Prize.
How many books do you know that contain the word duvet, two bears, reappearing pajamas, animated eyebrows, a just-smelted bloom of iron, and one fermata? In Molly Tenenbaum’s new collection, Mytheria, all this—plus an anagram, an old car beating like a heart, and a bottle of water—sustain a figure learning to live in the strangeness of having been born to these shape-shifting minor gods, parents, whose shapes shape the world.
Praise for Mytheria:
The poems in Molly Tenenbaum’s Mytheria are marked by agility and velocity. Here is a new dawn for the elegy, nearly gleeful in its manic impulse but bristling with gut-twisting loss. These kinetic, rapid-fire poems ask, what do we become in the absence of our loved ones? Syntax twitches in surrealist fairytales gone awry, where a daughter is recreated in krill, bakelite, clove, and meat, and a mother is cast from breadcrumbs, candles, and clear bones. Line after line, the sensory world ignites, blurs, and shakes us awake (“Her violent practice, her etudes of yellow-tinged grape,/ her buttery gold scales….her coppery math.”) Tenenbaum’s work has a remarkable surface beauty coupled with an epic vision, novelistic in scope. Mytheria is an exciting, spinning top of language that is at once impossibly grief-filled and exuberant.
--Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of Lullaby (with Exit Sign)
“It doesn’t matter/ where the door is,” Tenenbaum tells us in these wonderfully elastic, precise and startling poems. Days are syntax rather than narrative, framing finely musical, and often playful, poems drawn from an inventive reweaving of everyday materials. These poems reimagine the figures of mother, father, daughter and lover—in an ode to her “collapsible mother” the speaker says, “I carry her in my compact,/ drink her from my travel cup”—within a lush and shifting natural landscape swerving with bicycles and “Geiger-tail” dogs. These are poems as vascular acts, circling as blood circles through a body: weirdly, expansively, perfectly direct.
--Megan Snyder-Camp, author of Wintering and The Gunnywolf
