Thaw - (National Poetry) by Chelsea Dingman (Paperback)

About the Book

Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kin ship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States.

Book Synopsis

Thaw delves into the issues at the core of a resilient family: kinship, poverty, violence, death, abuse, and grief. The poems follow the speaker, as both mother and daughter, as she travels through harsh and beautiful landscapes in Canada, Sweden, and the United States. Moving through these places, she examines how her surroundings affect her inner landscape; the natural world becomes both a place of refuge and a threat. As these themes unfold, the histories and cold truths of her family and country intertwine and impinge on her, even as she tries to outrun them.

Unflinching and raw, Chelsea Dingman's poems meander between childhood and adulthood, the experiences of being a mother and a child paralleling one another. Her investigation becomes one of body, self, woman, mother, daughter, sister, and citizen, and of what those roles mean in the contexts of family and country.

Review Quotes

Thaw announces the beginning of a poetic career readers of poetry will be following for the ages, because Dingman is a poet for the ages. The sheer beauty of her poems, with their tremendous lyric power, will make a believer out of you. Her work takes those difficult moments we experience in silence and in grief and gives them imagistic force so sharp and detailed that we, as readers, are tempted to look away. But we don't, because this poet's siren song is one we can't help but listen to, despite the hard truths on display.--Allison Joseph "author of My Father's Kites: Poems"

Anyone seeking the gossipy shadows traumas can cast will be disappointed in Thaw; these poems, like the sky, are choosy about what they'll let fall from their mysterious hands.--Amie Whittemore "Southern Indiana Review"

In her debut collection, Dingman deftly parallels intimate sorrow with the brutal realities of rural poverty and violence... Dingman sets her scenes well, with the tough rhythms of life coming through, and her excellent work will be appreciated by a range of readers.--Barbara Hoffert "Library Journal"

Snow blankets everything in Chelsea Dingman's debut, a tenderhearted collection about family and grief, pregnancy and loss... In these poignant, finely crafted poems, the past is hard to forget.--Ben Purkert "Guernica Magazine"

About the Author

CHELSEA DINGMAN's first book, Thaw (Georgia), was chosen by Allison Joseph to win the National Poetry Series. Dingman is also the author of the chapbook What Bodies Have I Moved and has won the Southeast Review's Gearhart Poetry Prize, the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize, the Water-stone Review's Jane Kenyon Poetry Prize, and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association's Creative Writing Award for Poetry. Visit her website: chelseadingman.com.