Sleeping Preacher - (Pitt Poetry) by Julia Spicher Kasdorf (Paperback)

About the Book

The poems in this book deal with life in a Pennsylvania Mennonite community and the tensions and conflicts that exist for the speaker as she tries to be true to two worlds, the other being New York City.

Book Synopsis

Winner of the 1991 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize.

The poems in this book deal with life in a Pennsylvania Mennonite community and the tensions and conflicts that exist for the speaker as she tries to be true to two worlds, the other being New York City.

Review Quotes

Kasdorf chronicles her difficult journey from the Mennonite community into which she was born to a secular life in New York City. The material presents an interesting and unusually close portrait of the Amish people-for the most part without sentimentality. . . . Paradoxically, the speaker justifies her new way of life by citing the lessons she learned as a child.-- "Publishers Weekly"

This is as good as poetry gets. The poems are tightly wrung, sweetness and pain intermingled.-- "Festival Quarterly"

About the Author

Julia Spicher Kasdorf is the author of Sleeping Preacher, Eve's Striptease, Poetry in America, and Shale Play: Poems and Photographs from the Fracking Fields, a documentary project created in collaboration with photographer Steven Rubin. She has also published a collection of essays, The Body and the Book: Writing from a Mennonite Life, and a biographical study, Fixing Tradition: Joseph W. Yoder, Amish American.