Let's All Die Happy - (Pitt Poetry) by Erin Adair-Hodges (Paperback)

About the Book

Winner of the 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize The poems in Let's All Die Happy explore apostasy, concerned with what happens after the beliefs and institutions which promised fulfillment leave us empty instead. Darkly humorous, the collection examines a patriarchal culture in which women are defined through their relationship to others.

Book Synopsis

The poems in Let's All Die Happy explore apostasy, concerned with what happens after the beliefs and institutions which promised fulfillment leave us empty instead. Through a darkly humorous lens, it also examines a patriarchal culture in which women are defined through their relationship to others and how this inheritance weighs heavily not only on the lives we lead but shapes what life it is possible to even imagine having. Ultimately, the poems push against these containers, burning through the stages of a woman's life until there's nothing left but to invent what's next, finding both loneliness and liberation in this reclamation.

Review Quotes

Born and raised in Albuquerque, Erin Adair-Hodges writes with a sort of Southwestern expansiveness, all that empty desert that swallows up our longing and loneliness and pushes us toward the big questions of existence. . . . Let's All Die Happy maps the loneliness of motherhood, charts the tragic despair of adolescence.-- "The Adirondack Review"

Here in Let's All Die Happy we encounter a voice that is insightful, confident, and deliciously specific. In poems of dark domesticity, this book speaks to both the anchoring and erasure that come with mothering: 'Some weeks/ no one says my first name, no one's/ tongue flicks the last letter out.' It's a remarkable debut.-- "Maggie Smith"

Uncertainty, disappointment, and patriarchy pervade a landscape of lost dreams and unexpected realities in Adair-Hodges's gloriously sardonic debut. . . It's a gritty and bewitching collection that revels in its vulnerability; Adair-Hodges incisively translates visceral emotions into tangible imagery while remaining emotionally fluid and preserving the integrity of her sorrow.-- "Publishers Weekly"

What's most impressive in this powerful book is the female speaker's voice--it's striking because what it says is often unexpected, surprising, and exactly right.-- "Ed Ochester, judge"

With 'a tube sock of doom' and 'lifeboats with lions, ' Erin Adair-Hodges uses a searing wit and a boundless reservoir of heart to expertly navigate the complexities of family histories and American anxieties. This is stunning debut collection. Always urgent, nuanced and deeply felt, Let's All Die Happy has something important to show us about being alive.-- "Matthew Olzmann"

About the Author

Erin Adair-Hodges is the author of Let's All Die Happy, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Recipient of the Allen Tate Prize and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, her work has been featured in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and more. Born and raised in New Mexico, she now lives with her family in Kansas City, Missouri, and works as a fiction acquisitions editor.