Edgewater: Poems

by Ruth L Schwartz

Overview

"In Edgewater, her powerfully moving and redemptive third collection, Ruth L. Schwartz writes with consummate passion, precision, and honesty of the raw hungers that give rise to the world, human and natural. In poems both lyrical and grit-laced, she grapples with her twofold, central question: How can we love fully, open-eyed and openhearted amid all the flaws and beauty, each other and the world? How could we not?" — Jane Hirshfield

"Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential. Her passionate poems are alive to the vulnerability of the body, the daily possibility of joy, and the deep struggle not only to make sense of, but to affirm a world where the terrorists 'opened fire: / as if it were a box, now cracked, / consuming its own lid and hinges, / sparking out, unstoppable, / into the tender, / flammable world. . . "' — Mark Doty

"Ruth L. Schwartz has reached a level of poetic maturity that we're used to seeing only in the best of our American poetry.... She assumes a public voice in these poems, which speak to us rather than at us in the way they offer moral solutions to the problems of our modern world. She does this ... by reaching after and trying to understand the natural world and her place therein, and by modulating her poems with a subtle, ghostly music which has the capacity to lull us into understanding more about ourselves and about the wonderful ambiguities of living life,most fully." — Bruce Weigl

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780060082536
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	07/23/2002
Series:	National Poetry Series
Edition description:	1ST
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Ruth L. Schwartz was born in 1962 and spent her childhood and early adulthood moving around the United States. She left home at age sixteen, received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her M.F.A. from the University of Michigan, then settled in the San Francisco Bay Area in 1985. She worked as an AIDS educator for many years, and has taught creative writing at Cleveland State University and Goddard College. She teaches at California State University, Fresno.

Schwartz's first book, Accordion Breathing and Dancing, won the 1994 Associated Writing Programs Award and was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in 1996. Her second book, Singular Bodies, won the 2000 Anhinga Prize for Poetry and was published by Anhinga Press in 2001.

Schwartz has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Astraea Foundation. Her other honors and awards include two Nimrod/Pablo Neruda Awards, two Chelsea Awards for Poetry, the New Letters Literary Award, the North Carolina Writers' Network Randall Jarrell Prize, Kalliope magazine's Sue Saniel Elkind Award, and a Reader's Choice Award from Prairie Schooner.

Table of Contents

I
	Fetch	3
	Edgewater Park	5
	Talking to God on the Seventh Day	7
	After Columbine	9
	December, Edgewater Park	11
	Bodies at Work	13
	Pond Beside the River of Kings	15
	Millennium Love Poem	17
	Pondering the President's Semen on the Intern's Dress While the Screen Door Creaks	23
	Why We Drive Highway Five in February	25
II
	Sunday Night at Edgewater Park	31
	Picnic	33
	Lautar	35
	September, Edgewater Park	37
	On the Way to the Airport	39
	Touch	41
	Oh God, Fuck Me	43
	Ohio Highway	45
	The Snake	47
III
	The Sky at Edgewater Park	51
	Important Thing	53
	Grapes	55
	One Life	57
	Aliens Can See Us Now	59
	From 30,000 Feet	61
	After You Held Me in Your Hands, Circling My Skin with Rivers of Touch, Training All the Blood in Me to Follow	63
	Proof	65
	Failure	67
	At the Wildlife Rescue Museum	69
	Oakland Sky After a Week of Rain	71
	Sandusky	73
	Sunset at Edgewater Park	75
IV
	The Swan at Edgewater Park	79
	This Monkey	81
	Not only the words, but the bodies we have	83
	Introduction to Poetry	85
	This	87
	In India	91
	Still Life	95
	Figs	97
	Cleveland, March	99
	Mandala	101
	The Perpetual	103
	Dog on the Floor in the Pet Food Aisle	105
	Letter from God	107
	Notes and Dedications	109

What People are Saying About This

Mark Doty

Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential.

Bruce Weigl

...a level of poetic maturity that we’re used to seeing only in the best of our American poetry....

Editorial Reviews

Ruth Schwartz writes with consummate passion, precision, and honesty of the raw hungers that give rise to the world.... — Jane Hirshfield

Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential. — Mark Doty

...a level of poetic maturity that we’re used to seeing only in the best of our American poetry.... — Bruce Weigl, author of The Circle of Hanh

From the Publisher

...a level of poetic maturity that we’re used to seeing only in the best of our American poetry....

Bruce Weigl

Ruth L. Schwartz will settle for nothing less than the essential.

Mark Doty

Ruth Schwartz writes with consummate passion, precision, and honesty of the raw hungers that give rise to the world....

Jane Hirshfield