Thaw
By Julie Sheehan
Selected by Marie Ponsot
The landscape of Thaw is America but the vast field of language is bravely Shakespearian. Sheehan's poems roil through catalpa, maurade through familial and domestic brakes, and, ultimately, brim to the top of the old earthen pot. Everywhere the poems remind that the endless—were we truly able to grasp it—would astonish. Each poem celebrates the ingredients, practice, and serving up of the fugitive mortal banquet, from pudding to bone.
“Okay, so this is a brave book. These poems wander the crowded rooms of the world and find God in the small details. Or maybe these poems just hope God is in the details. Or maybe these poems teach us how to ignore and be ignored by God, whatever God is. In any case, these are not sterile psalms, but passionate, messy, contradictory, humorous, painful songs of the (dare I say it?) soul.” — Sherman Alexie
“Julie Sheehan’s poetry, at its best and most characteristic, exuberantly returns us to Walt Whitman (the real Whitman, and not the barbaric imitators) and to Walt’s grand parodist in Fernando Pessoa’s Alvaro de Campos. There are ten splendors here: “For a Mother and Daughter,” “Swing Set, 1972,” “Quaking Aspen,” “104º,” “Almost Summer Heat,” “Hats of Brooklyn,” “The Brooklyn Museum,” “Cast Stones,” “Summer Chapels,” and “Smale Byrdys Y-Stwde.” They establish a voice, a stance, a vision, a joyous evasion of the negative. Despite all the academic impostors, inchoate rhapsodes, and shrill ideologues, I nevertheless rejoice, because Julie Sheehan’s poems compel me to rejoice.” — Harold Bloom
“There is a useful mythic analogy for the action of this gaily disconcerting poet: Isis searching the world for limbs of a dismembered Osiris which she must re-member in order to possess the world’s body. Any rhetoric, every patois serves the poet’s turn as the mourning, exultant goddess whose specialty it is to incarnate as well the disjecta membra of her consort: “I am flung apart…splayed so wide my arms embrace the lit-up sky.” Sheehan’s Deep murmurs with many voices, the cries of lovers and children and all the echoes of old rhetorics she reassembles in her wilde Jag. I cannot get the music of that chase out of my ears.” — Richard Howard
“The book cover of ‘Thaw’ entices with what looks like the ice-encrusted coil if an old refrigerator touched with water droplets, and the poetry inside, with its eclectic mix of language and style, is just as enticing.”
— Sioux City IA Journal