Blue Orange (May 2012)By Robert GrunstISBN: 978-0-912592-12-1Winner of the 2010 Robert McGovern Publication Prize, Nominated by Marilyn Chin Available at: Ashland Bookstore | Amazon
- Marilyn Chin “In Robert Grunst’s poems the city’s forgotten signs rise from memory into mid-day light. Blue Orange conveys the luster of words, revealing both an older and brightened sense of the world. These poems are at once both shrewd and true.” - Stephen Kuusisto “The blue orange is something forgotten in a fruit drawer, spoiling, before its discovery releases a second beauty. The image serves the poet well in poems that recover ghosts of family members and his own childhood, lives of hard labor and damage, lives he honors. The ripe orange is something else entirely, appearing as it does in poems about the now—full of loved ones and travel to remote, strange places—where the speaker hopes to find ‘something marvelous / some inconceivable / inscape // Instead you chance upon a world / of grief.’ The journey of the book, then, brings us from dimness into light, to the bite of the fruit, to the best gift: the sweet acid of the present in the mouth.” - Richard Robbins
About the Author Robert Grunst’s first collection of poems is The Smallest Bird in North America (New Issues, 2000). His poems have appeared in American Literary Review, Cimarron Review, The Iowa Review, Nimrod, Poetry East, Seneca Review, Tar River Poetry, and many other magazines. His essays focusing on the history and culture of the Great Lakes commercial fishery have appeared in a number of publications including Inland Seas, Lake Superior Magazine, and Michigan History Magazine. Grunst was born in Fort Wayne, Indiana and raised in Holland, Michigan on the western shore of Lake Michigan. He taught 9th grade English for the Midland, Michigan Public Schools and subsequently spent three years working as a gillnet fisherman and engineer on Lake Michigan and Lake Superior. He teaches a variety of courses including creative writing as Professor in the English Department at St. Catherine University in Saint Paul, Minnesota. |
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