Publisher Description

Deborah Garrison's "The Second Child" is a book of poems about family in a world both more exciting and more frightening than ever before. It explores many facets of motherhood - ambivalence, trepidation and joy - coming to terms with the seismic shift in her outlook and in the world around her. She confronts her post-9/11 fears as she commutes daily into New York City, continuing to seek passion in her marriage and wrestling with her feelings about faith and the mysterious gift of happiness. Her critically acclaimed first collection, "A Working Girl Can't Win" chronicled the progress and predicaments of a young career woman. This new book shows her moving into another stage of adulthood, starting a family and saying goodbye to a more carefree self. Sometimes sensual, sometimes succinct, always candid, "The Second Child" is a meditation on the extraordinariness resident in the everyday - nursing babies, missing the past, knowing when to lead a child and knowing when to let go. With a voice sound and wise, Deborah Garrison examines a life fully lived.

Author Biography

Deborah Garrison was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and educated at Brown University and New York University. For 15 years she worked on the editorial staff of The New Yorker and is now the poetry editor at Alfred A. Knopf and a senior editor at Pantheon Books. She lives with her husband and three children in Montclair, New Jersey. She has published two collections, A Working Girl Can't Win (Faber, 1999) and The Second Child (Bloodaxe Books, 2007).

Review

'With their short lines, sneaky rhymes, and casual leaps of metaphor, Garrison's poems have a Dickinsonian intensity' - John Updike'It takes agility and imagination to write well about the ordinary...Garrison's first book won readers...with directness, modesty and unshowy wit. Those qualities also mark her new collection, The Second Child. This time the material includes parenthood and the attacks of September 11, 2001, with their aftermath...Garrison keeps her blessed and quotidian balance, in a remarkable way' - Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World 'Touching...the new poems are wonderful and different... This book...gives us equally weighted joys and sorrows' - Courtney Birst, Bookslut

Review Quote

'With their short lines, sneaky rhymes, and casual leaps of metaphor, Garrison's poems have a Dickinsonian intensity' - John Updike'It takes agility and imagination to write well about the ordinary...Garrison's first book won readers...with directness, modesty and unshowy wit. Those qualities also mark her new collection, The Second Child. This time the material includes parenthood and the attacks of September 11, 2001, with their aftermath...Garrison keeps her blessed and quotidian balance, in a remarkable way' - Robert Pinsky, Washington Post Book World 'Touching...the new poems are wonderful and different... This book...gives us equally weighted joys and sorrows' - Courtney Birst, Bookslut

Details