New poems from a National Book Award winner
Following her National Book Award-winning Door in the Mountain: New and Collected Poems, 1965–2003, Jean Valentine returns with a meditative and magical new collection. In Little Boat, Valentine continues her exploration of spiritual life, confronting the realities of aging and death in the serene and dreamlike voice so beloved by her many readers. Infusing even the most melancholy subjects with warmth and humanity, Little Boat explores such subjects as grief, ordinary objects, illness, and memory, carrying the reader into disparate worlds, rendering the complexity of our common experience through startling images. The poet’s extraordinary juxtapositions blur the boundaries of the material world and the invisible, the given and the assumed, the present and the sometimes recently absent. Readers will find Valentine’s quiet epiphanies on rich display here, as this much-heralded poet quietly merges the sorrowful and the sublime.
“Little Boat is a book of mystical minimalism, poems pacing the horizon between life and death. Valentine looks hard at our mortal gestures—and sees in them evidence of a radical, heretical, sacred benevolence.”—Rosanna Warren, author of Departure
“Little Boat is one of Jean Valentine’s most beautiful and moving books in a lifetime of such books.”—Lynn Emanuel, author of Then, Suddenly
Click here for TABLE OF CONTENTS
From the Book:
I am twenty,
drifting in la chalupa,
the blue boat painted with roses,
white lilies—
No, not drifting, I am poling
my way into my life. It seems
like another life…
—from “La Chalupa, the Boat”
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JEAN VALENTINE is the author of ten books of poetry, including Door in the Mountain (2004), winner of the 2004 National Book Award.
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This project is supported in part by an award from the
 National Endowment for the Arts
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