This Is Still Life - (Mineral Point Poetry) by Tracy Mishkin (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

"An anthem against apathy" --Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat

Read Tracy Mishkin's poems as an antidote to the "meat wheel full of teeth" that is the contemporary news cycle. Not because this dangerously clever collection soothes, or because it provides comfort, but because these lyrics are urgent without shallow or callous bids for the reader's attention, and instead render the heartbreak of America as gorgeously as an old master's Vanitas--it's the beauty of the poems that provides hope, even as the menace of the grinning skull cannot.

This Is Still Life fully invests in the double meaning of the title as it uses the dirty minutia of domestic life to symbolically stand in for our ruin while pointing to how the sunlight gilds the dirt so sweetly, we can't help but get up again in the morning. "Talk radio, speak / to my heart of all that I have lost," Mishkin's speaker prays, and we find ourselves praying, too, while the poems work polish into our hope.

Review Quotes

"Tracy Mishkin writes with a wry and delicious honesty, her images vivid and memorable. Here the personal observation often colludes with a larger, overwhelming reality, resulting in poems that are timely and fresh. ... Only a real talent could present our complicated reality so truly and so well."

--Sarah Gordon. author of Flannery O'Connor: The Obedient Imagination and A Literary Guide to Flannery O'Connor's Georgia

"Read This is Still Life for the astonishing way it braids darkness and light. Read these poems for hope in a broken time. Whatever your reasons, read these poems. And do it now."

--Kiki Petrosino, author of Witch Wife

"An anthem against apathy."

--Amelia Martens, author of The Spoons in the Grass Are There to Dig a Moat (Sarabande Books, 2016)

"Tracy Mishkin's clear, practical language cuts to the heart of the quotidian to expose the hopelessness of the American dream, a circle of our own particular hell where Despair sleeps on a pool table with his head on the eight ball. Hers is an unswerving intelligence that sees in the way her neighbors 'cut their eyes' what it means to be Jewish in a nation where a third of the population believes only Christians are truly American. But she also finds in a drawer of odd socks a 'ray of yes in a world of no.' It is with such small whimsicalities that Mishkin would rouse the pool-table sleeper. Our sense of the absurd may not save our lives, but it may save our souls."

--Sherry Chandler, author of The Woodcarver's Wife