Excavations: A City Cycle

Southern Classics

by Jennifer R. Pournelle, Rigoberto Gonzales (Forward)

"The excavations that take place in this book are literal and metaphorical. As the speaker moves through Europe, the Middle East, and the American Southwest, she's undertaking a serious study of the brick and mortar composition of cities such as Vienna, Berlin, San Diego, and Baghdad. But each city is, as the speaker notes, 'a city within a city,' that is, a story within a story, the layers of which come to light as the speaker soaks up each environment—its textures, its temperatures, its temperaments—its past offenses, its present troubles, and its future possibilities."
—Rigoberto Gonzalez, author of Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa, from the foreword.

Selected by Rigoberto Gonzales as the winner of the South Carolina Poetry Book Prize, Excavations is the first collection of poetry from Jennifer R. Pournelle. Set in different cities over fifteen years of peace and war, the collection explores the hidden similarities of these locations' seemingly different landscapes and cultures. She begins in Vienna with the renovation of Saint Michael's Square, then to a just-reunified Berlin, onward to Spanish-influenced San Diego, ending in the midst of the sectarian conflicts of Baghdad. Through vivid explorations of place, Pournelle's narratives bring to the surface defining historical events from these sites and their host cultures as the poems reveal how events rooted in these locations ripple outward to affect the world beyond. A career soldier turned environmental anthropologist and archeologist, Pournelle is deeply attuned to visions of loss and destruction as well as the promise of rebirth and rediscovery. Her poems voice her individual experiences abroad as she sifts—literally and metaphorically—through layers of turbulent history and harsh present circumstances in search of promise of future recovery for all that has been lost.

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2011

About the author

Dr. J.R. Pournelle is an archaeologist and anthropologist best known for reconstructing landscapes surrounding ancient cities. A Research Fellow at the University of South Carolina’s School of The Environment, and past Mesopotamian Fellow of the American School of Oriental Research, her work in Turkey, Iraq, and the Caucasus has been featured in Science Magazine, the New York Times; on The Discovery Channel; and on a National Geographic Television segment aired in January, 2012. In a former life, she received numerous decorations for service as a United States Army intelligence officer and arms control negotiator, and as a civilian directed reconstruction work in Iraq.

Pournelle received the South Carolina Poetry Initiative Book Prize, for Excavations, A City Cycle, Poems 1989 - 2004, released by the University of South Carolina Press in October, 2011.

Reviews

[Deborough Blalock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Get out your mental and emotional spades. Layers of connections show us how the old becomes new and the new becomes old. Pournelle is a gem of a writer who turns dinosaurs into diamonds. Prepare to be dazzled.