Phrasebook for the Pleiades is back from the printer and available from Cider Press Review.

Order your copy today from the Cider Press Review bookstore.

Advance praises for the book:

I am dazzled by Phrasebook for the Pleiades and humbled, and gladdened, for these are works of strong polyvalence and resonance.  They ricochet about the brain and cause that singing linguistic frisson I think of as intellectual beauty, one of poetry’s most scintillating gifts to the life of the mind.  Oh please read them.  If you care at all about what’s going on in contemporary poetry, you will, and if you don’t care, these poems may cause you to care.

—Gray Jacobik

 

Through song and seeming prestidigitation, haunted by myth and love, Lorraine Doran is a virtuoso of perspective: on postcards, from above, or in situ on a childhood street, her poems arrive at angles to what we know, to show us what we need. What does the soul want? A Phrasebook for the Pleiades. Thank goodness we have one now.

—Alan Michael Parker

 

With their luminous traces of Dickinson’s lightning slants, Lorraine Doran’s poems plumb the depths of a world where facts coalesce and opalesce into striking metaphors and transformations (a wedding dress becomes a cloud, an arm becomes a wing), all orchestrated—whether in verse poems or exactly shaped prose poems by her quietly exuberant language. Hers is a world of wideawake awareness and visionary edges, with its own kind of understated rapture.  Replete with wonders, the poems in this radiant debut collection are tuned to the frequency of ordinary facts made strange by the poet’s ability to see into what is, and by doing so to let the rest of us understand what is really there: between “backyards” and “bitten heels” falls the blessing.  “You remember everything/ with its own small fire,” she says, and that’s exactly how the poems in Phrasebook for the Pleiades burn—mapping her own finite, named world with an eye always on something close to the infinite.

—Eamon Grennan