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Vegetarian Alcoholic Press, 2021
Poems from Slowly/Suddenly were first published in Driftwood Press, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Raleigh Review, Whale Road Review, and elsewhere.
The poems in Slowly/Suddenly are deeply concerned with the human and our bodies: mothering bodies, struggling bodies, objectified bodies. From the very start—”I am watching a woman pull her own child from her body.”—Allison Blevins’ dazzling Slowly/Suddenly takes us on an intimate and personal journey that is also urgent in its universality. The uses and limitations of language bind these poems together across love, loss, patriarchy, and illness. Blevins’ words are a keen, beautiful, and often heartbreaking wonder.
—Lynn Melnick, author of Landscape with Sex and Violence
“After diagnosis, every word requires reimagining,” writes poet Allison Blevins. Bravely traversing the difficult territory of mothering through devastation and physical pain, SlowylSuddenly is a collection of poems determined to find new vision, new possibilities for moving in language. It’s not an easy predicament the poems make, but powerful, certainly, even wrenching.
—Sally Keith, author of River House
Slowly/Suddenly begins with a remark by painter Joan Mitchell that she desires to paint everyone and everything in her life, “nothing closed out.” Allison Blevins takes Mitchell’s words—and her paintings, which animate many of the poems—as inspiration. Infertility and motherhood, memory and loss, love and infidelity: Blevins conjures poems from the website of the National Multiple Sclerosis Society, from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, from episodes of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. “My father once opened his chest in the kitchen: his thin glass heart, the stuttering weep from his / eyes. Even the neighbors could hear the splinter and groan” begins “Season 11, Episode 7: ‘Return From Paradise.’” In these poems, Blevins exposes the thin glass heart beating in all our chests. You do not want to look away.
—Katherine E. Young, author of Woman Drinking Absinthe