Description
Winner of the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
In this collection of vital, elegiac poems, Deborah Gorlin inventories her dead in urgent acts of recognition and commemoration. Family members—both nuclear and extended—appear in their native stories to reanimate local histories, intimate geographies, and lost times. In a different series of personae poems, Gorlin catalogues dolls and totems within their particular cultural habitats, which range from Africa to the Andes, and imagines their daemonic hopes, dreams and emotions. In a final act of inclusion, she takes stock of her own spiritual hesitations, yearnings, and approximations. She reaches out to the dead by trying to imagine the afterworld–the groundless and eternal spirit realm.
Gorlin’s celebration of both the tangible and intangible–objects rich with life and history and the untouchable that lies beyond–and her exploration of such crazy topics as fingernails, Hebraic trees, and fat, inspired Alice Fogel, NH Poet Laureate, to call this collection a sampling of emptiness and fullness from which we can learn how to “occupy the vacancy.”
Deborah Gorlin has published in a wide range of journals including Poetry, Antioch Review, American Poetry Review, Seneca Review, The 
Massachusetts Review, The Harvard Review, Green Mountains Review, Bomb, Connecticut Review, Women’s Review of Books, New England Review, and Best Spiritual Writing 2000.
Before winning the 2014 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize, Gorlin won the 1996 White Pine Press Poetry Prize for her first book of poems, Bodily Course. Gorlin received her B.A. from Rutgers University and an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine. Since 1991 she has taught writing at Hampshire College, where she serves as codirector of the Writing Program. She is also a poetry editor at The Massachusetts Review. Gorlin currently lives in Amherst, MA.
