Publisher Description

In Laura Read's second poetry collection, the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA, weaves past and present together to create a portrait of a life in progress. As the speaker looks back on her life, she exists simultaneously as all the selves she has ever been: a lost child, a lonely adolescent, a teacher, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a mother-a woman continually shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. Deeply rooted in a particular time and place, Read's poems strip away the illusion of the passage of time as they reveal how we are all wearing "dresses from the old country."

Author Biography

Laura Read was born in New York City and has lived most of her life in Spokane, WA. She is the author of Dresses from the Old Country (BOA Editions, 2018), Instructions for My Mother's Funeral (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry), and the chapbook The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You (winner of the Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award, 2011). A recipient of a Washington State Artists Trust Grant, a Florida Review Prize for Poetry, and the Crab Creek Review Prize for Poetry, Laura presents regularly at literary festivals and conferences throughout the Northwest, including GetLit!, Write on the Sound, Litfuse, and the Port Townsend Writers Conference. Laura served as Spokane's Poet Laureate from 2015 to 2017, and she currently teaches at Spokane Falls Community College.

Review

"No one can deliver a deadly and disarmingly frank line like Laura Read, whose nostalgia and memory for high school jobs at Taco Time and green eyeliner and childhood (her own and her sons') and learning (her own and her students') is as barbed as it is brilliant. This is one of the most beautiful and wickedly true collections I've read in ages, and it reminded me of how rare it is to find someone who writes 'a true sentence, the one you finally say.'" –Alexandra Teague"Laura Read is one of the great love poets of our age – her love is wide and searching, generous and demanding. She offers the fullness, complexity, and yearning of a daughter's, wife's, mother's, and lover's feelings. Fully human and deeply nuanced, Read's poems propose a vision of love that is generous, abundant, and self-sacrificing, but also these speakers will be damned if a woman offering so much of herself will be ignored or erased. This is a beautiful collection that envisions the end of muses and imagines what reciprocal and empowered devotion might make possible.""'I knew I had to go back under,' writes Laura Read, as she dives once again into the night-black waters of the opening poem of her second full-length collection, Dresses from the Old Country. 'Someone was down there / who had to be saved.' And who drifts in depths? Who requires rescue? The dreamy, desirous girl the poet once was? The sweet, sad, sometimes wicked woman she is? An old, ridiculous boyfriend? Her son grown so suddenly into a man? I'll tell you, reader, I think it's us—you and me. Truly, I haven't been so knocked out, so heart-struck by a book of poems in a good long while. 'No one told me this about love,' Read writes, near the end of this astonishing collection, and I think, Me neither, me neither! Until now, at least." —Joe Wilkins, author of The Mountain and the Fathers and When We Were Birds

Promotional

Galley mailing to key reviewers and media outlets 4-5 months prior to publication.Advanced review copies sent to key review outlets such as Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The LA Times, The Rumpus, Poets & Writers, Huffington Post Poetry, BookForum, LA Review of Books, PBS NewsHour, NPR, etc.National advertising: Poets & Writers, American Poets, and the Academy of American Poets newsletter.Outreach to online media and bloggers including BuzzFeed, Bustle, Book Riot, Literary Hub etc. for featuresBuy-ins to relevant academic conferences, trade shows, and publications: American Library Association Annual Meeting, CBSD Sales and Academic catalogs, etc.Fall book announcements submitted to Publishers Weekly.Online/social media campaign: Extensive promotion through BOA's website and blog: Facebook (6,800+ followers), Twitter (8,000 followers), Instagram (2,200+ followers), and Pinterest (840+ followers) accounts; print and e-postcards; and print and e-catalogs.Electronic book announcement postcards will be sent to author's list of academic contacts, reviewer contacts, bookstore contacts, and literary bloggers.Electronic newsletter feature will be emailed to BOA's database of 7,500+ contacts.Ebook will be available at the same time as print publication to maximize sales. Ebook ISBN will be included on all press materials, author and publisher websites, and whenever print ISBN is listed. Publisher and author will be promoting both electronic and print editions via social media.Laura will attend and sign books at the 2019 AWP Conference in Portland, OR.Plans for a multi-city book tour, including readings in Spokane, WA, Seattle, WA, Bellingham, WA, Portland, OR, Missoula, MT, Moscow, ID, Chicago, IL, Warrensburg, MO, and New York, NY.Possible joint readings/events with BOA authors Kathryn Nuerenberger, Keetje Kuipers, and Erika Meitner, as well as Kathryn Smith (Book of Exodus, Scablands Books), Alexandra Teague (The Wise and Foolish Builders (Persea Books), and Maya Jewell Zeller (Alchemy for Cells & Other Beasts, Entre Rios).Promotion through the author's website and social media feeds.Website: /

Review Quote

"No one can deliver a deadly and disarmingly frank line like Laura Read, whose nostalgia and memory for high school jobs at Taco Time and green eyeliner and childhood (her own and her sons') and learning (her own and her students') is as barbed as it is brilliant. This is one of the most beautiful and wickedly true collections I've read in ages, and it reminded me of how rare it is to find someone who writes 'a true sentence, the one you finally say.'" -Alexandra Teague "Laura Read is one of the great love poets of our age - her love is wide and searching, generous and demanding. She offers the fullness, complexity, and yearning of a daughter's, wife's, mother's and lover's feelings. Fully human and deeply nuanced, Read's poems propose a vision of love that is generous, abundant, and self-sacrificing, but also these speakers will be damned if a woman offering so much of herself will be ignored or erased. This is a beautiful collection that envisions the end of muses and imagines what reciprocal and empowered devotion might make possible." -Kathryn Nuernberger "'I knew I had to go back under,' writes Laura Read, as she dives once again into the night-black waters of the opening poem of her second full-length collection, Dresses from the Old Country. 'Someone was down there / who had to be saved.' And who drifts in depths? Who requires rescue? The dreamy, desirous girl the poet once was? The sweet, sad, sometimes wicked woman she is? An old, ridiculous boyfriend? Her son grown so suddenly into a man? I'll tell you, reader, I think it's us--you and me. Truly, I haven't been so knocked out, so heart-struck by a book of poems in a good long while. 'No one told me this about love,' Read writes, near the end of this astonishing collection, and I think, Me neither, me neither! Until now, at least." --Joe Wilkins, author of The Mountain and the Fathers and When We Were Birds

Excerpt from Book

VACCINATION The scar on my arm is thin like the skin of a fruit close to splitting. It marks my birth as before ''72, before the end of smallpox but after polio, after the wheelchairs and the iron lungs, the radios crackling with war. If you were born then, you remember taking your Halloween candy to the fire station to have it checked for razor blades. Maybe there was one black girl in your class like Martha Washington who brought upside-down clown cones for her birthday and then moved away. You watched the Challenger blow up on the news again and again. I was there in my boots and eyeliner, waiting by the wall until a boy asked me to dance. His mouth was a shock of salt. I flicked my name off like ash from my cigarette. I loved how the tip flamed, like the squares of coal in our furnace. Maybe you remember my father. He was thin and transparent like the place where the needle went through. Maybe I can peel it off, the dead skin from a burn, the kind we got back then, before sunscreen, when we just took off our clothes and got in. WHEN YOU HAVE LIVED A LONG TIME IN ONE PLACE things start to vanish. Like the old Newberry''s where I used to buy earrings that looked like tacks, six pairs for a dollar, and then go sit at the lunch counter with the old people eating patty melts and drinking black coffee. They stared in front of them like the women on the bus with their plastic rain scarves that they took from their purses when the bus lurched towards their stop. They wore dresses from the old country. Now I wonder if they have nowhere to go. The building stands empty like a mind that can''t remember the words that stick things to their places, pants, chair, toast. How can we remember if they keep taking things down, like the house where I lived when I was young and waiting for love? I lay there in the yard in my bathing suit pink as a poppy and I could feel his shadow when it touched my body. Now there is only a clean slate of grass where that house stood, the same grass that covers the spot in Lincoln Park where there used to be a wading pool where I took Ben until the day I turned away to get a toy for him and then he was face down in the water, and I pulled him out and we looked at each other and I could see in his eyes that he couldn''t believe the water was heartless, that it didn''t know who he was. BUREAU When my husband asks me where I put the keys, I say, they''re on my bureau, and he says, you mean dresser and I say, no, bureau. Your mother must have brought that with her from New York, he says, and I say, yes, she carried it with its three top drawers for her silk panties and slips, her stockings, the small scent sachets she always used, embroidered like my grandmother''s handkerchiefs, my grandmother who came once a year to see my mother and her bureau, who poached her egg in the early mornings on the kitchen stove. I didn''t know poach, didn''t know pocketbook, the black bag she opened at the metal, magnetic clasp and drew out a gold tube of lipstick, a romance novel with a picture of a man with his hand on a woman''s breast like the print of the Rembrandt hanging over our mantel. But that man looked like he had asked permission, like he knew he only had this small circle of light and he should touch the fabric of her dress before feeling for what was under it, the skin that had been sleeping for years beneath a girl''s nightgown, like the ones I keep folded in my bureau, and the one I took from my grandmother''s apartment in Queens after she died. It is still in its plastic-- she must have ordered it from a catalogue when she could no longer go down into the city but had to look out at it from a great height so she was closer to the telephone wires her voice traveled to my mother like a thin road, winding and black, the kind you drive at night, the moon always with you. Now that she is gone, I unwrap her nightgown. It is pink and sleeveless and I wear it standing on our porch so I can feel the wind.

Description for Sales People

Dresses from the Old Country is the second collection by Laura Read, who recently completed a two-year term as the poet laureate for Spokane, WA. Her first book, Instructions for My Mother's Funeral was selected by Dorianne Laux for the Donald Hall Poetry Prize in 2011. Strong regional appeal: the collection references landmarks and historical events in Spokane and Eastern Washington, and the author is well connected to the literary community in the Pacific Northwest. Themes of motherhood, feminist theory (specifically related to women's bodies), and how gender shapes identity are threaded throughout this collection, giving it an extra appeal for both women and any reader interested in women's and gender studies. Several poems reference Flashdance, Rocky, and other pop culture touchstones from the '70s and '80s that will appeal to Gen-X and Millennial readers.

Details