Incarnadine: Poems [Paperback]

Winner of the 2013 National Book Award for Poetry

* An NPR,Slate,Oregonian,Kansas City Star, Willamette Week,andPublishers WeeklyBest Book of the Year * Amazon's Best Book of the Year in Poetry 2013 *

InIncarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist's formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry's insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning???for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive,Incarnadineis the new collection by one of America's most ambitious poets.

???In her gorgeous second collection, Mary Szybist blends traditional and experimental aesthetics to recast the myth of the Biblical Mary for this era. In vulnerable lyrics, surprising concrete poems, and other forms, and with extraordinary sympathy and a light touch of humor, Szybist probes the nuances of love, loss, and the struggle for religious faith in a world that seems to argue against it. This is a religious book for nonbelievers, or a book of necessary doubts for the faithful.??? ???National Book Awards judges citation

???A religious book for a secular America, this is among the molS