From “Knee Deep in Mud My Mother”
Would you be so terrifying
uncoffined, dried earth caked on your calves,
disintegrating in a field among weeds
like an animal whose death
makes a place large and strange?
Uchmanowicz’s poetry lives in its form and its formalism enlivens the line and space between images “in perpetual flight.” Breathless accents, a parade of local color, deep sympathy with existence, the work is a continual reaffirmation of the poet’s need for life.
“Uchmanowicz portrays a ‘year-rounder’s’ Cape Cod of fickle weather, untimely deaths, and gritty sensuality. Her taut, precise poems are vivid enough to grab a reader at first sight and rich enough to reward a second reading.” — Chronogram
Pauline Powers Uchmanowicz is Associate Professor of English and director of Writing Across the Curriculum at the State University of New York at New Paltz. Her poems and essays have appeared in many national publications, including Ploughshares, Crazyhorse, Ohio Review, Mudfish, The Massachusetts Review,and Z Magazine. She has published scholarly articles in College English, Writing Program Administration, Literature and Psychology, and elsewhere. In addition, Uchmanowicz is a widely published freelance writer in the Hudson Valley and a food columnist for The Woodstock Times. She was recently awarded a SUNY-wide Chancellor’s Award for Teaching Excellence.
|
