Publisher Description

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby, a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens.In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a "fatal diagnosis," how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body "meant to bend & breed" opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our "common griefs" so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these-a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates.Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a "child who won't ever get born": with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. "You think your one life precious-"And Bad Hobby thinks-hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces "inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us." And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. "Don't worry, baby," Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. "We're okay."

Author Biography

Kathy Fagan is the author of Bad Hobby and Sycamore, a finalist for the Kingsley Tufts Award. She is also the author of four previous collections, including The Charm; The Raft, winner of the National Poetry Series; and MOVING & ST RAGE, winner of the Vassar Miller Prize. Fagan's work has appeared in venues such as the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry, The Nation, the New Republic, Best American Poetry, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and an Ingram Merrill Foundation Fellowship, and served as the Frost Place poet in residence. Fagan is cofounder of the MFA program at The Ohio State University, where she teaches poetry, and coedits the Wheeler Poetry Prize Book Series for The Journal and The Ohio State University Press.

Table of Contents

1 Dedicated  Forest  Stray  Animal Prudence  Cooper's Hawk  Farm Evening in theBlue Smoke  At the Champion AvenueLow-Income Senior & Child Care Services Center  AccuWeather: Real Feel  Keelson  Dahlia  Foreshortening  Cognition  My Father  Bad Hobby   2 Empire  Fountain  The Rule of Three Helvetica  Omphalos  The Ghost on theHandle  Predator Satiation AccuWeather: Episodes of Sunshine  The Supreme Farewellof Handkerchiefs  Birds Are PublicAnimals of Capitalism  Personal Item  The Children  "Where I Am Going"/"IDare to Live"  Topless  Mint  Morning   3 Latecomer  What Kind of Fool Am I  Conqueror  School  AccuWeather: Windy, with Clouds Breaking  Window  Trace  Wisdom  Aftermath  My Mother  Ohio Spring Jingo  Snow Moon & theDementia Unit  Scarlet Experiment  Lucky Star  Inactive Fault, withEchoes   Notes  Acknowledgments

Review

"Fagan leans into descriptions of the world that pay tribute to what it is, not what it could or might be. 'How will I choose,' she writes, 'between Heaven & Sorry.' This vibrant book resides in that in-between, honoring the loss that comes with love."—Publishers Weekly
"I drank Kathy Fagan's Bad Hobby down in one gulp, as I suspect you will, Reader. I can't imagine that anyone could set this book down with poems still unread. Fagan's subject is loss—the death of one parent, the receding of the other into dementia's distances: 'I said like, as in: like we kill time. / I mean metaphor, as when time kills us back.' 'The art of losing,' as Bishop wrote, is mastered here with intelligence, wit, tenderness, and a blending of the personal, historical, and etymological. Reader, prepare yourself for wonderment. Take time. Drink up."—Maggie Smith"Bad Hobby is an exquisite and excruciating book of continual epiphany and insight. The poems are gorgeous, or they're stony, or they're both; they astutely examine caregiving, memory-making, the inscrutability of childhood, the inscrutability of old age, and how on earth to exist in between. In this tenuous time, I'm so grateful for Fagan's brilliant excavations of hospitals and pastures and classrooms and dreamscapes and how a body learns to live and to die."—Natalie Shapero"The poems of Bad Hobby seem familiar because they are familiar. We recognize ourselves in these lines and stories. We see ourselves as children, adults, and the elderly."—Tweet Speak Blog
Praise for Sycamore"It's hard not to fall in love with this book, with its bravado and vulnerability. Kathy Fagan's mind is endless with depth and truth—her thoughts like songs, her heart and wit twin birds flying in the air of the pages, landing on the tree limbs of her lines. How fierce and immense to imagine living in her grove of sycamores, hardy, odd, and gorgeous. There, we are bigger than ourselves—we are each other too, living and remembering within each other's shadows, limbs, sky. Sycamore is a book a reader clutches to her chest, eyes closed for a moment in bliss and recognition."—Brenda Shaughnessy"Sycamore is a complex and layered poetic consideration of the mortality of relationships, of the body, of eros, and, most generally, of the moments in time we momentarily inhabit. These are timeless poetic themes, but what Kathy Fagan does with them is stunningly original. From the cryptic and fascinating 'Platanaceae Family Tree' that opens the book, Sycamore is erudite and referential and nonetheless consistently welcoming as we navigate Fagan's inventive structures and nuanced wordplay. This collection gives us a full view of the human heart and mind simultaneously in action."—Wayne Miller"Kathy Fagan's poems are pitiless, sensual, mythic, and steeped in elucidative mystery. I admire her sleek armor of language and landscape: she may 'dress defensively'; however, 'all that pristine weather / and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.' Fagan's sleights of hand reveal yet withhold, out of mercy, hard-won beauty and pain: 'Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more.' Sycamore is one of the most inventive, vulnerable, and moving collections I have read in years."—Randall Mann"Kathy Fagan's poems burn like halos, and if sycamores could bow, they would bend to kiss her hands for rendering them in such haunting light, in such daring reach. Don't miss this beautiful, knowing book."—Barbara Ras"Sycamore, Fagan's dynamic fifth collection of poems, explores the loss of a loved one through the singular and deeply personal voice of one woman and, in so doing, evokes the gut-wrenching effects of grief through vibrant, ever-evolving images culled from the natural world." —Kenyon Review"Sycamore delights as much in its close inspection of the natural world as it does in the auditory pleasures of its language. 'Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more,' the speaker recites, and we know we are in the hands of a gifted word master. 'Though they are not a choir . . . not Kabuki,; the trees become a temporary stand in for love, for her 'amours,' providing the solace and steadiness necessary to stage a rebirth."—Boston Review"Sycamore burns like ice, with a seemingly cool crystalline surface nonetheless hot to the touch. . . . Fagan's flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve, and make an excellent companion for meteorological or existential cold snaps."—Publishers Weekly"Fagan erects a veritable forest in her fifth collection. Austere and elegant, the first poems call forth a cold, still world inhabited by ghosts. . . . Still, though, there is substantial hope. Trees grow, emotions thicken, and, structurally, poems melt: shorter, tenser lines ultimately give way to sprawling ones."—Booklist

Promotional

• Digital galley campaign, with galleys available for major media, poetry media, women's media, booksellers and librarians; digital galleys available for download on Edelweiss
• Media outreach, positioning this as an accessible book that explores the role of caregiver from the perspective of a daughter caring for her aging and disabled father, battling the convoluted health care systems, for readers of Maggie Smith and Ada Limón
• Bookseller outreach, with focus on accounts that sell poetry widely, as well as stores in Ohio, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Iowa City, Seattle and Minneapolis
• Cover reveal and preorder social media campaign in collaboration with Gramercy Books in Columbus
• Newsletter promotion via the publisher to readers, sales and academic lists of more than 30K contacts, with special emphasis on academic channel for course adoption
• Major virtual launch in Columbus

Long Description

From Kingsley Tufts Award finalist Kathy Fagan comes Bad Hobby , a perceptive collection focused on memory, class, and might-have-beens. In a working-class family that considers sensitivity a "fatal diagnosis," how does a child grow up to be a poet? What happens when a body "meant to bend & breed" opts not to, then finds itself performing the labor of care regardless? Why do we think our "common griefs" so singular? Bad Hobby is a hard-earned meditation on questions like these--a dreamscape speckled with swans, ghosts, and weather updates. Fagan writes with a kind of practical empathy, lamenting pain and brutality while knowing, also, their inevitability. A dementing father, a squirrel limp in the talons of a hawk, a "child who won't ever get born": with age, Fagan posits, the impact of ordeals like these changes. Loss becomes instructive. Solitude becomes a shared experience. "You think your one life precious--" And Bad Hobby thinks--hard. About lineage, about caregiving. About time. It paces "inside its head, gazing skyward for a noun or phrase to / shatter the glass of our locked cars & save us." And it does want to save us, or at least lift us, even in the face of immense bleakness, or loneliness, or the body changing, failing. "Don't worry, baby," Fagan tells us, the sparrow at her window. "We're okay."

Review Quote

"I drank Kathy Fagan''s Bad Hobby down in one gulp, as I suspect you will, Reader. I can''t imagine that anyone could set this book down with poems still unread. Fagan''s subject is loss--the death of one parent, the receding of the other into dementia''s distances: ''I said like, as in: like we kill time. / I mean metaphor, as when time kills us back.'' ''The art of losing,'' as Bishop wrote, is mastered here with intelligence, wit, tenderness, and a blending of the personal, historical, and etymological. Reader, prepare yourself for wonderment. Take time. Drink up." --Maggie Smith " Bad Hobby is an exquisite and excruciating book of continual epiphany and insight. The poems are gorgeous, or they''re stony, or they''re both; they astutely examine caregiving, memory-making, the inscrutability of childhood, the inscrutability of old age, and how on earth to exist in between. In this tenuous time, I''m so grateful for Fagan''s brilliant excavations of hospitals and pastures and classrooms and dreamscapes and how a body learns to live and to die." --Natalie Shapero "The poems of Bad Hobby seem familiar because they are familiar. We recognize ourselves in these lines and stories. We see ourselves as children, adults, and the elderly." --Tweet Speak Blog Praise for Sycamore "It''s hard not to fall in love with this book, with its bravado and vulnerability. Kathy Fagan''s mind is endless with depth and truth--her thoughts like songs, her heart and wit twin birds flying in the air of the pages, landing on the tree limbs of her lines. How fierce and immense to imagine living in her grove of sycamores, hardy, odd, and gorgeous. There, we are bigger than ourselves--we are each other too, living and remembering within each other''s shadows, limbs, sky. Sycamore is a book a reader clutches to her chest, eyes closed for a moment in bliss and recognition." --Brenda Shaughnessy " Sycamore is a complex and layered poetic consideration of the mortality of relationships, of the body, of eros, and, most generally, of the moments in time we momentarily inhabit. These are timeless poetic themes, but what Kathy Fagan does with them is stunningly original. From the cryptic and fascinating ''Platanaceae Family Tree'' that opens the book, Sycamore is erudite and referential and nonetheless consistently welcoming as we navigate Fagan''s inventive structures and nuanced wordplay. This collection gives us a full view of the human heart and mind simultaneously in action." --Wayne Miller "Kathy Fagan''s poems are pitiless, sensual, mythic, and steeped in elucidative mystery. I admire her sleek armor of language and landscape: she may ''dress defensively''; however, ''all that pristine weather / and footwear later to discover: dead is still dead.'' Fagan''s sleights of hand reveal yet withhold, out of mercy, hard-won beauty and pain: ''Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more.'' Sycamore is one of the most inventive, vulnerable, and moving collections I have read in years." -- Randall Mann "Kathy Fagan''s poems burn like halos, and if sycamores could bow, they would bend to kiss her hands for rendering them in such haunting light, in such daring reach. Don''t miss this beautiful, knowing book." --Barbara Ras " Sycamore , Fagan''s dynamic fifth collection of poems, explores the loss of a loved one through the singular and deeply personal voice of one woman and, in so doing, evokes the gut-wrenching effects of grief through vibrant, ever-evolving images culled from the natural world." -- Kenyon Review " Sycamore delights as much in its close inspection of the natural world as it does in the auditory pleasures of its language. ''Sycamore. Sick amour. Seek no more,'' the speaker recites, and we know we are in the hands of a gifted word master. ''Though they are not a choir . . . not Kabuki,; the trees become a temporary stand in for love, for her '' amours ,'' providing the solace and steadiness necessary to stage a rebirth." -- Boston Review " Sycamore burns like ice, with a seemingly cool crystalline surface nonetheless hot to the touch. . . . Fagan''s flinty, well-crafted poems abound with texture and verve, and make an excellent companion for meteorological or existential cold snaps." -- Publishers Weekly "Fagan erects a veritable forest in her fifth collection. Austere and elegant, the first poems call forth a cold, still world inhabited by ghosts. . . . Still, though, there is substantial hope. Trees grow, emotions thicken, and, structurally, poems melt: shorter, tenser lines ultimately give way to sprawling ones."-- Booklist

Excerpt from Book

AT THE CHAMPION AVENUELOW-INCOME SENIOR & CHILD CARE SERVICES CENTER When I told them itmust be like dropping yourkid off at school theirfirst day, all my parent friends nodded and smileduncomfortably,meaning what would I know. Iwon''t be takingsolace in the many firstsahead. Here among the gray, spotted and brownheads of the seniors, their soft flesh andangles, their obedience as they sit as uprightly asthey are able at white, parallel tables, nobody cries,and very fewspeak. When I seat dad besideher, one senior tells me she''s ninety-four,presenting one hand, four fingers in the air,just as she might have ninety years ago with astranger like me, now long gone. Dad never liked me totalk: Lower your voice, he''dsay. If I was louder: Put on your boxinggloves. Or: You''ll catch more flies with honeythan vinegar, as if some day I''d need the flies. Istopped talking, started writing instead. I workfull-time and dad wants to die, so I dropped him atthe Champion Avenue Low-income Senior& Child Care Services Center, a newish building,municipal and nondescript, in a neighborhoodthat''s been razed and rebuilt so often it''s got nodiscernible character left. There was bingo, men playing poker in acorner. Red sauce and cheese on white bread pizzafor lunch. Dad, a big talker, was an instant hit,but refused to return. What is the name of thatanimal, someone asked me. Where is Philip, askedsomeone else, over and over. As if firsts and lastswere one and the same. KEELSON Like a cracked cup ofmilk, the swan leaks white on the wet dock.It''s hard to know if this is normal. I''mworried, and ashamed to be. "Sensitive," itwas called by the family, in the hushed tones ofa fatal diagnosis. My grandfather, alsosensitive, was a "great reader," they said, acrease in his cuffed pants, fedora on his head inall weathers. He retired early from the Cotyfactory, lungs clotted with sweet-smellingpowder. Our rounds included the library,the church, the river, and the shoe store,each equally holy, he and the salespersonzealously attentive to the room needed formy toes to grow. As he aged, he drankless and talked more, played Simon &Garfunkel''s "Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, andThyme" on his Victrola, cooled tea in a saucer,drew in his shaky hand what looked likeboats with crosses inside. "Keelson," hewrote underneath, "Use this as akeelson." He''d dreamed it, he said, many times,God gave him the vision. How could Iunderstand? I never saw my immigrantgrandparents exchange a warm word, not a touch, nota glance, but I worried them, joined them inthat worry. They sent me to drama camponce to help me "come out of myshell." The teacher said I had the melancholylook of an Audrey Hepburn, only less"buoyant." Teachers used to say, when youmisspelled a word, "Look it up in thedictionary." How can you look it up in thedictionary if you can''t spell it? Before theinternet, nothing and no one could ask you, "Do you meanSWAN LAKE?" when you looked upSWAN LEAK. Now, when a Swiss friendtexts "Let''s go for perch in Morges," my heartleaps with the poetry of it, like a fish on theline, like the invisible keelsons bobbing toward thedock. Look it up: you can listen to a Frenchspeaker pronounce Morges , see Audrey Hepburn''sSwiss home nearby, memorize the Frenchwords for tea, yogurt, and cherries, which Ilong to buy at market each day,and which, every day as I practice, tumblefrom my mouth like body parts from adump-truck. How familiar, how reassuring Ienvision the puzzled, pitying, mildly disgusted looksof incomprehension on the vendors'' faces tobe. Which is why I stopped speaking in the firstplace, and would sooner go hungry than ask tobe understood. BAD HOBBY From his pocket, mydad pulls A roll of woodentoothpicks Bound with a rubberband. We''re driving to theV.A. To have his toenailstrimmed, As we do every threemonths, "A standingappointment," I used to say to him, But he no longer getsthe joke, Asking only why Ican''t Do it myself. And whywon''t I? I''ve catheterized him, Twice, but can''t bringmyself To tend his feet, solike mine, Wide with high arches-- Ballerina feet, my mom Called them, none ofus dancers. Now that he''s livedwith me For almost as long ashe lived With her, I''mbeginning To look likemom--pissed. The podiatry techs arealways good- Natured, thanking dadfor his service, Raising their voiceswhen I remind them he can''thear. The big toenail on hisleft foot Looks to be made ofhorse hoof.

Description for Sales People

Author's previous book, Sycamore, was a finalist for the prestigious Kingsley Tufts Award Author is widely published in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, Poetry Magazine, The Nation, the New Republic, and the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day program We expect strong blurbs from Victoria Chang, Yona Harvey and Natalie Shapero Book's engagement with family, caregiving, aging, disability, class structures, and motherhood makes this an accessible book with opportunities for wide readership

Details