Her entry begins:The last book I finished was Kathleen Rooney's essay collection, For You, For You I Am Trilling These Songs. Rooney's voice is damningly funny and redemptively articulate; during one essay, on the epidemic of student plagiarism (and how easily it is identified by their professors), I nodded along so vigorously that the bartender asked if everything was okay. Rooney's subject matter shears close to the skin, both personal and political. One of her strongest pieces, "However Measured or Far Away," is about a cousin's decision to join a convent, while "Fast Anchor'd, Eternal, O Love!" is a daring look at emotionally-charged relationships within a Chicago senator's office. Rooney is a writer of multiple interests--I have also enjoyed her Live Nude Girl (on being an art model) and her poetry collection Oneiromance. But this is a particularly intimate and...[read on]I Was the Jukebox is the winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize, selected by Joy Harjo and published by W. W. Norton.
“These poems are fresh, crisp, and muscular. They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now.”
—Joy Harjo, prize citation
Beasley's first collection, Theories of Falling, won the 2007 New Issues Poetry Prize.Her nonfiction has been featured in the Washington Post Magazine and she is working on Don’t Kill the Birthday Girl: Tales from an Allergic Life, forthcoming from Crown. Beasley lives in Washington, D.C.
Learn more about Sandra Beasley and her work at her website and her blog, Chicks Dig Poetry. Listen to the poet read selections from I Was the Jukebox.
Writers Read: Sandra Beasley (February 2008).
Writers Read: Sandra Beasley.
--Marshal Zeringue
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