Description
Speech Crush by Sandra McPherson is part of the California Poets Series.
Like kintsugi, the Japanese art of repairing a broken vessel with lines of tree sap and gold, the poems in Sandra McPherson’s new book, Speech Crush, run a vein of intelligence and attention through often harrowing experiences—of deep loss, of scammers and self-immolators, of institutionalization and separations that rival those of Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” And like the work of Bishop and Leonard Cohen, two poets whose long practice led us to a place whose gates are suffering and wisdom, McPherson’s poems ask us to take into ourselves a wrecked, a transformed beauty. Here it is.
— Jordan Smith, author of Little Black Train and Common Spirits
Readers intimately acquainted with Sandra McPherson’s vivid, metaphorical voice and her wise poetic conscience over the decades—as well as readers encountering her soul-stirring poems of the environment for the first time, or delighted by her daughter’s precise musicality in the title poem—will receive blessings beyond measure from Speech Crush. This dazzling treasury celebrates the bejeweled fruitfulness of a woman’s life-journey with the strength and tenderness of a redwood’s annular rings. This book is a rare and tremendous gift.
— Karen An-hwei Lee, author of Rose is a Verb: Neo-Georgics, Sonata in K, Phyla of Joy, Ardor, and In Medias Res
Sandra McPherson is the author of Speech Crush (Gunpowder Press, 2022). She has twenty-one prior collections published, including five with Ecco, three with Wesleyan, two with Illinois, one with Ostrakon, and one, The 5150 Poems, with Nine Mile Books. Newer work has appeared in TriQuarterly, Pedestal, Field, Poetry, The Iowa Review, Yale Review, Agni, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, Ecotone, Cimarron, Nine Mile Magazine, Crazyhorse, Basalt, Cirque, Palette Poetry, Plume, Red Wheelbarrow, Epoch, Willow Springs, Vox Populi, Whitefish, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Antioch Review. She taught for 23 years at the University of California at Davis and 4 years at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Her collection of 67 African-American improvisational quilts is housed at the University of California at Davis Design Department. She founded Swan Scythe Press. She is adopted, and is the great-grand-niece of Abby Morton Diaz, Plymouth feminist author and abolitionist. She is the mother of a daughter on the autism spectrum. As a grad student at the University of Washington, she met Henry Carlile in Elizabeth Bishop’s class and they were married for many years. Her second husband was the late Walter Pavlich (Sensational Nightingales: Collected Poems of Walter Pavlich).
