Pulse - by Maria Nazos (Paperback)

About the Book

"Named for the Pulse nightclub shooting and the rhythm of heartbeats, this collection of poems grapples with finding life amid profound losses. The poems of PULSE look deeply into a troubled world, inspecting what makes us suffer and demonstrating how we overcome difficulties. PULSE interrogates painful losses of friends to cancer, harmful politics, hate crimes, and mass shootings, including the 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub. Maria Nazos examines the life force that continues to pulse relentlessly through a fragmented world, that enables us to flow, breathe, and regenerate, even through grief and loss. From Provincetown beaches and Costa Rican crab shacks to Midwestern plains and a Tampa nightclub, the collection moves through madness, redemption, and love"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

Named for the Pulse nightclub shooting and the rhythm of heartbeats, this collection of poems grapples with finding life amid profound losses.

The poems of PULSE look deeply into a troubled world, inspecting what makes us suffer and demonstrating how we overcome difficulties. PULSE interrogates painful losses of friends to cancer, harmful politics, hate crimes, and mass shootings, including the 2016 massacre at Pulse nightclub. Maria Nazos examines the life force that continues to pulse relentlessly through a fragmented world, that enables us to flow, breathe, and regenerate, even through grief and loss. From Provincetown beaches and Costa Rican crab shacks to Midwestern plains and a Tampa nightclub, the collection moves through madness, redemption, and love.

Review Quotes

"In PULSE, Nazos builds a lyric terrain where myth kisses motel neon, and every love song is underscored by rupture. Nazos moves effortlessly between forms--not as ornament but as necessity, language singing and stinging at once. . . . Like a disco ball above a war zone, PULSE pulses with why poetry matters, with grit and glitter. These poems remember what it's like to be wild and breakable, to be held and to vanish, to run toward danger just to feel the wind. They don't flinch--from longing, from the shattered, from desire, from the messy afterglow of all of it, the 'gold in the olive oil.'"--David Koehn, author of "Sur"

"Nazos has written for the world a seismic, incandescent tribute to life. It is devotional with a ferocious tenderness. Here is a poet who can and has resurrected ghosts in our veins--the parents destined to drown in quiet despair, and the lovers who linger like bruises. This collection doesn't flinch from darkness or the suffocating weight of grief. Yet Nazos transforms pain into a strange, stubborn grace. From the cliffs of Delphi to the cornfields of Nebraska, she maps a world where history bleeds into the present. Her voice is both elegy and rebellion, hymn and rhyme. To read PULSE is to touch the 'dirty human sweetness' of existence itself: flawed, forgiving, and furiously alive."--Saddiq Dzukogi, author of "Your Crib, My Qibla"

"Sometimes poetry trills, tramples, thrupples backward into the time when we didn't know who we were. These poems are like that. When the vine breathing above our head doesn't mean to strangle us, and the man looming over us doesn't doom us to strangulation either, but all the while, our voicebox becomes our own: PULSE refuses to sorrow deep and instead blooms and plunges into wonder up where the air grows thin. Up here, we hear a woman singing."--Kate Gale, PhD, author of "Under a Neon Sun"

About the Author

Maria Nazos is the author of A Hymn that Meanders and Still Life. Her poetry and translations have been published in the New Yorker, TriQuarterly, World Literature Today, Columbia Review, American Life in Poetry, and anthologies including What Saves Us: Poems of Empathy and Outrage in the Age of Trump.