Becky’s Pick of the Month (Crow Mercies is Magically Delicious)

This month, we’re excited to release Crow Mercies by Penelope Scambly Schott. I was personally very drawn to this manuscript early in the production process. Schott’s poetry has a magical realism quality to it that I admire in fiction authors like Juan Rulfo, Gabriel García Márquez, and Toni Morrison (also, Kathleen Alcalá, who published this fantastic book), but that unusual to find in the contemporary poetry of the Pacific Northwest.  Her imaginative narratives push the boundaries of what is metaphor and what is description, to a place that my “poetry gut” desperately wants to go.

My favorite poem, “Holes in the World” is a good example of what I mean by this.  In other poems, her mother is a Calypso Orchid, a homeless woman lives in someone’s closet, and the speaker sits with an ancient Croatian woman, but in “Holes in the World,” Schott’s subject is a bear husband.

She starts off with an italicized section that establishes our interconnectivity, “breath from the mouth/ blood from the womb // vertebrae of dead whales / reamed by the seas.”

In the verse that follows, the speaker is taken by a bear husband “to wive/ and we mated in a cave.”  The poem is broken into couplets to better illustrate this coupling of nature and human, and freedom and captivity.

I tell my husband the bear

I am not you

This, I explain is the source

of our lonesomeness

paw to paw

and the air between us.

It’s writing that dares to venture into the strange and the magical that is brave enough to say something real.  While Schott’s writing is still fairly linear and deeply rooted in narratives, her subjects and imaginative leaps twist the experience of the reader in surprising ways.

While I tend to think of Schott’s work as magical realism, Poet Peter Sears in this blurb calls it surrealism. How would you classify Schott’s work? Or, does her poetry resist this kind of categorization?

Remember, all month Crow Mercies is 20% off and has free shipping. Don’t miss your chance to read it for yourself!

–Rebecca Olson, Assistant Editor

Staff Pick of the Month: Crow Mercies

Crow Mercies

We at CALYX Books are so excited to say that Crow Mercies by Penelope Scambly Schott, winner of the first Sarah Lantz Memorial Poetry Prize, is now available as the Staff Pick of the Month!

Penelope Scambly Schott leads readers through a surreal world in which imagined visitors, realities, bodies, and animals create a ripe emotional landscape. Her depictions of love, family, sex, and death through vivid images of spiders, orchids, bear-husbands, and more will startle and delight the imagination. Upon reviewing Crow Mercies, Claire Keyes notes, “Schott’s inventiveness makes the preposterous seem both real and poignant.”

Crows, Schott observes, are smart and relentless, and they practice a measured mercy. Likewise, the poems in Crow Mercies survey large territories, sometimes with an overview and sometimes close-at-claw. In her review, blogger Stefanie Hollmichel of somanybooksblog.com writes, “Schott also has a strong, firm, voice and an accessible style that invites the reader in to share an intimate moment.” This unique style allows the poet to use her provocative poetry to survey the long course of women’s history as she studies her dying mother.

Penelope Scambly Schott has published three poetry narratives, five chapbooks, and four poetry collections, including Six Lips (2009). She is the recipient of the Hopwood Award, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, a Poetry Society of America prize, and four fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts. Her recent collection, A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth, received the 2008 Oregon Book Award for Poetry. Schott has a PhD in Medieval literature from City University of New York.

If you missed your chance to preorder and save on this fabulous collection, you still have time! As the Staff Pick of the Month, you will receive 20% off and free shipping!

Look for more blogs about our favorite poems from the collection all this month!

Happy reading

Kelsey Connell, Assistant Director