Tag Archives: grief & other animals

“Lowering” by Patty Paine

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grief & other animalsLeaving hour, how quick
it came. The train echoed
across the valley, over Tickfaw Creek,
trembled the ryegrass at the edge
of town, then further
still, beyond Black Mountain
clear to strange weather.
Now, six days from land
the compass has gone out of me.
These cursed waves thrash
like thieves, and what a mockery
of song the wind is making. Dearest,
the sea is another tongue
for loss, for misery, for coffin.
For grief: the rusty hinge of it,
the knife stab sudden of it.

–Patty Paine,
Grief & Other Animals
(Accents Publishing)

patty paine for grief launchPatty Paine is the author of The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse(Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, The Louisville Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor ofDiode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is interim director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

2015—The Books

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Accents Publishing released ten books in 2015.

“Merciless” by Patty Paine

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grief & other animals1.

Again, the pigeons arrive,
three months, and still expecting
a scribble of seed along the sill.
How not to hate their relentless
innuendo, their inexhaustible need
to return? The hand that feeds you
is no more. Take your stupid swagger,
your useless iridescence, alight
yourselves, be gone.

2.

The night you hit the black ice
of addiction, it came to me
razor clean. After, someone wailed
and keened and turned
beggar. Someone strung
beads of no, no, no. Someone
collapsed, and broke open,
while someone else murmured
over, over, over

–Patty Paine,
Grief & Other Animals
(Accents Publishing)

patty paine for grief launchPatty Paine is the author of The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse(Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, The Louisville Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor ofDiode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is interim director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Patty Paine on Grief & Other Animals

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Accents has just released your second full-length collection. Can you describe the growth or changes you’ve experienced as a writer between Grief & Other Animals (Accents Publishing, 2015) and The Sounding Machine (2012)?

grief & other animals by patty paineAfter The Sounding Machine there was a great deal of upheaval in my life. I lost someone close to me from a drug overdose in 2013, and everything previous about my life was ransacked. I suppose the blessing of having one’s life excavated is the opportunity to examine what was unearthed. This close looking occurred in therapy and with the support of friends, and was a recursive process that reticulated across the connection between the who and the what of me—which is to say, I grew as a person and a writer. I think living with addiction is itself a form of addiction in that it isolates, it requires corrosive compartmentalization, and it thrives in denial. Once I learned how to live differently, I wrote differently. I now live and write more authentically, more securely, more confidently, and with more self-awareness.

I think about it this way: I’ve lived in the Arabian desert for eleven years, and when you live in the desert long enough you come to forget what you miss. And so I learned while visiting Beijing several years ago. I was walking through a botanical garden, when I was struck by a sound I didn’t recognize. It was a papery, soft rustling that slowly rose in my awareness and revealed itself as the sound of the breeze lifting leaves into song. The sound stilled me, filled me with a sudden expansive joy, and I was moved, both by how easily something sublime could be lost, and by how simply it could be restored. For me, the changes that occurred in my life were (are) much like this—amidst great loss, there was (is) a reawakening into simple and elemental joys and experiences. Continue reading →

“O Grief” by Patty Paine

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grief & other animals October 31, 2013

Every day the white-hot
burn of you.

Grief, intransigent
bastard you, ants marching

my counters, every day I kill
you, every day you march again.

I could get used to you,
the extravagant pain of you,

the slack jawed
dead at the end

of a needle, you.
But tonight, I’ll walk into you,

past Trick-or-Treaters,
with their open mouthed

bags of want, their hastily sewn
illusions. Past them,

and into you, always
into you.

–Patty Paine,
Grief & Other Animals
(Accents Publishing)

patty paine for grief launchPatty Paine is the author of The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, The Louisville Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor ofDiode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is interim director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.

Grief & Other Animals by Patty Paine

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grief & other animals by patty paineGrief & Other Animals takes the reader on a stunning emotional journey through the process of coping with tragic loss from the “knife-stab sudden” pain of initial grief to the reemergence of hope in a poignant new poetry collection from Patty Paine.

What Others Say About Grief & Other Animals

Patty Paine’s superb new collection arises from the nearly unbearable—a mother’s death, but most especially the senseless death of a husband. And, as the crucial elegiac poets know, grieving never truly arrives in “stages,” and never ends in “closure.” It is a process infinitely more intricate and nuanced than the platitudes suggest, and it ends, at best, in only a fraught and vexed consolation, what one of her poems calls, “a sorrow deeper than solace.” Yet even a vexed consolation can be a form of quiet triumph, and these poems—spare, heartbroken, and always utterly precise—arrive repeatedly at such a triumph. Patty Paine has written a book of bravery and consummate artistry.

—David Wojahn

 

Elegy, in making grief a living thing, brings the dead back to life. But elegy is also how we ask ourselves to accept, a touching of the wound to accustom ourselves to pain. This stunning book both resurrects and more truly buries, and does what the best poetry does—shows me the world of another, and in doing so, brings me closer to my own. I feel bitten by these haunted poems.

—Bob Hicok

Grief and Other Animals reminds us of the great but elusive presence that stays with us after great loss, like a shadow without a subject. Paine takes on the ineffable through metaphor, action through repetition, and life through catalogs. From North Carolina to Doha, Qatar, these lyrics chronicle dates and their respective weights. She insists we “have to believe that language is a body / that won’t die.” These poems then offer us a body in which to live, an hourglass container that Paine skillfully turns over and over so it never runs out.

—Emilia Phillips

Grief & Other Animals is now available from the Accents Store.

patty paine for grief launchPatty Paine is the author of The Sounding Machine (Accents Publishing), Feral (Imaginary Friend Press), Elegy & Collapse (Finishing Line Press), and co-editor of Gathering the Tide: An Anthology of Contemporary Arabian Gulf Poetry (Garnet Publishing & Ithaca Press) and The Donkey Lady and Other Tales from the Arabian Gulf (Berkshire). Her poems, reviews, and interviews have appeared in Blackbird, The Louisville Review, Gulf Stream, The Journal and other publications. She is the founding editor of Diode Poetry Journal, and Diode Editions, and is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar where she teaches writing and literature, and is interim director of Liberal Arts & Sciences.