Once, Then [Paperback]

In her debut full-length poetry collection, Andrea Scarpinos elegies move between personal and political loss, between science, myth, and spirituality, and between lyric intensity and narrative clarity. At their heart is a longing for those we have lost, and an acknowledgement that loss irrevocably changes us and what we understand of the world. Blending mythological figures such as Persephone and Achilles, scientific approaches to knowledge learned from her microbiologist father, and a deep ambivalence regarding religious ideas of death and afterlife, Scarpinos poems invite us to examine the world, our own place in it, and what to make of its continual collapse.

An etymology of goodbye, Andrea Scarpinos full-length debut rejuvenates the elegy and bears witness to a world in continual collapse.

Poetry never brings back those weve lost, but the best poems of mourning forge dignity in a newly emptied world. The craft, restraint, and lyric insistence of Andrea Scarpinos poems giveOnce, Thenan Orphic intensity. This book is gorgeous, and necessary.
Don Bogen

In these Orphic songs of grief, Andrea Scarpino honors those whose deaths break empathy wide open in us. Two very personal losses embark Scarpino on a lyrical underworld journey, where she traverses the atrocities we know as Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the Manson murders and others, in order to create her own etymology of goodbye. WithOnce, Then, Andrea Scarpino balances private and public, the human and the mythic scale, thereby restoring our classical notion of the elegiac poem.
Kathy Fagan, author ofLip

Self Portrait as Achilles
?
When he told of my birth, my father
always said,And there were your toes
?
pointing straightastonishment, two feet
that wouldnt flex no matter how he pushed
?
against my soles. Plaster casts to my hips
then surgery, a cut down each heel
?
to lengthen tendl3œ