Books
Dear Delinquent
Is it possible for poetry to be simultaneously raw and elegant, direct and oblique, hurtful and consoling? Yes, says Dear Delinquent, Ann Townsend's incandescent new collection. "My heart presses my ribcage like an octagon fist," she writes, taking on the persona of both betrayed and betrayer. Through poems that masterfully recall the styles of Sylvia Plath or Philip Larkin, Townsend convinces us that, even in its most destructive forms, love is the driving force behind all behavior. This is an incandescent new collection.
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American Public Media podcast covering Dear Delinquent's title poem
Finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award
Finalist for the Ohioana Book Award, Readers’ Choice Winner for Poetry
The New York Times, “New & Noteworthy”
The Coronary Garden
In "Love Poem, Unwritten," Ann Townsend identifies a physical abnormality of the poet's heart as a figure for human love: fragile, vulnerable creatures, our very imperfection opens us to connection and grace. The Coronary Garden is a collection braiding love and mortality, and through these quietly powerful poems Townsend announces her presence as a serious voice in contemporary poetry.
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In subjects as varied as babies, saints, sex, illness, and the natural world, Townsend locates mystery and gives it to the reader. Her images surprise and delight: "His hands, specked and freckled / like an Irish trout"; "The bird's yellow bars flame on the wind, / slice a circle from the air"; "The sun nurses the grass / to its greenness." But such figures are not merely perceptual; they imply a way of seeing that extends a moral dimension into the nonhuman world. The poems are modest in their recognition of human limits, daring in their assertion of the reach of individual vision.
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As we are enlivened by Townsend's perceptions, we are also stirred and provoked by her elisions: these poems know what to leave out. In the sly sexuality of the poem "Your Body's Weight Upon Me," for example, the heat generated by Townsend's details—the sweater pushed aside, her "whitest skin," the flowers wrapped in butcher paper—is balanced by the greater heat of what's left unsaid. For W. H. Auden, poetry was the "clear expression of mixed feelings." Ann Townsend's poems embody this axiom, letting us relearn the lessons of the heart, in the midst of change and transformation.
Dear Delinquent
Is it possible for poetry to be simultaneously raw and elegant, direct and oblique, hurtful and consoling? Yes, says Dear Delinquent, Ann Townsend's incandescent new collection. "My heart presses my ribcage like an octagon fist," she writes, taking on the persona of both betrayed and betrayer. Through poems that masterfully recall the styles of Sylvia Plath or Philip Larkin, Townsend convinces us that, even in its most destructive forms, love is the driving force behind all behavior. This is an incandescent new collection.
​
American Public Media podcast covering Dear Delinquent's title poem
Finalist for the Heartland Booksellers Award
Finalist for the Ohioana Book Award, Readers’ Choice Winner for Poetry
The New York Times, “New & Noteworthy”
The Coronary Garden
In "Love Poem, Unwritten," Ann Townsend identifies a physical abnormality of the poet's heart as a figure for human love: fragile, vulnerable creatures, our very imperfection opens us to connection and grace. The Coronary Garden is a collection braiding love and mortality, and through these quietly powerful poems Townsend announces her presence as a serious voice in contemporary poetry.
​
In subjects as varied as babies, saints, sex, illness, and the natural world, Townsend locates mystery and gives it to the reader. Her images surprise and delight: "His hands, specked and freckled / like an Irish trout"; "The bird's yellow bars flame on the wind, / slice a circle from the air"; "The sun nurses the grass / to its greenness." But such figures are not merely perceptual; they imply a way of seeing that extends a moral dimension into the nonhuman world. The poems are modest in their recognition of human limits, daring in their assertion of the reach of individual vision.
​
​
As we are enlivened by Townsend's perceptions, we are also stirred and provoked by her elisions: these poems know what to leave out. In the sly sexuality of the poem "Your Body's Weight Upon Me," for example, the heat generated by Townsend's details—the sweater pushed aside, her "whitest skin," the flowers wrapped in butcher paper—is balanced by the greater heat of what's left unsaid. For W. H. Auden, poetry was the "clear expression of mixed feelings." Ann Townsend's poems embody this axiom, letting us relearn the lessons of the heart, in the midst of change and transformation.
Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry
An essential collection of essays by important contemporary poets about the forms and rhetorical strategies of lyric poetry.
Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry is a significant new book on poetry from its earliest, traditional roots to its most recent and fractured forms. The essays gathered here, by an array of brilliant contemporary poets, explore the history of the lyric poem, its rhetorical modes and strategies. How does the lyric operate in an elegy, a love poem, or an ode? How is meaning conveyed by a pastoral poem, the sublime, the narrative? How does the lyric investigate nature, beauty, and time? How are these lyric forms and strategies received? Radiant Lyre gives the contemporary reader a sense of the origin, evolution, and present status of the modes and means of lyric poetry. David Baker and Ann Townsend have assembled an important anthology, vital to any serious reader of poetry.