The Book of Nature
Regan Good
Christopher Stackhouse, Illustrator
February 2009
unequal parts mind and matter, remnants and loss, belief and despair
Suzanne Wise
About the Author
Regan Good is a graduate of Barnard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop where she was a Maytag Fellow. She was a poetry fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in 2001 and has been granted multiple residences at the Yaddo Corporation, the MacDowell Colony and other colonies. Her poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Antioch Review, New Letters, American Letters & Commentary, Fence, Exquisite Corpse, Lit, Cue, and other journals. A chapbook called The Imperfect was published by Westown Press in 2005.
Praise
In The Book of Nature, Regan Good diagrams, with harrowing precision, the machinations of a savage landscape composed of unequal parts mind and matter, remnants and loss, belief and despair. Stark, wild, unsettling, even frightening, these prose poems find evidence of abomination yet ultimately assert the imagination's compulsion to question and create. The Book of Nature is a fierce reckoning with the elemental forces of language, the physical world, and human will.
Suzanne Wise
The 'nature' of Regan Good's poems is neither benign, nor consoling, nor restorative, nor innocent. It is, instead, a state of 'mortal ignorance,' a theater of elemental combat in which 'the air is the enemy' and 'the hummingbird snags in the thorn bush.' And it is, too, the site from which the human animal bodies forth in full-throated unease, speaking in menaced whispers, furtive asides, and tones—alternately lush and stark—that are not less beautiful for their bereavement.
Mark Levine
About the Contributor
Christopher Stackhouse is a writer, artist, curator, and teacher. His books include the poetry collection Plural (Counterpath Press), and an image/text collaboration with John Keene Seismosis (1913 Press). His work has been published in several literary journals and arts periodicals including Hambone, Modern Painters, Art in America, and The Brooklyn Rail. He is an advisory board member at Fence Magazine and a contributing editor at BOMB Magazine. He has taught at the New York Center for Art & Media Studies, Naropa University, and at the Maryland Institute College of Art, among other institutions.
In the News
Publication Details
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 20 pp, 6 x 6 in
Publication Date: February 01 2009