In the Volcano's Mouth

by Miriam Bird Greenberg

Winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Winner of the 2017 Bob Bush Memorial Award for Best First Book of Poetry from the Texas Institute of Letters
Miriam Bird Greenberg’s stunning first collection, which roves across a lush, haunting rural America both real and imagined, observed from railyards and roadsides, evokes the world of myth (“I’d spent my childhood / in a house made of bees; on hot days honey // dripped through cracks in the ceiling,” she writes). Yet these capacious, exquisitely tensioned poems are rooted in Greenberg’s experiences hitchhiking and hopping freight trains across North America, or draw from her informal interviews with contemporary nomads, hobos, and others living on society’s edges. Beneath their surface runs a current of violence, whether at the hands of fate or men: she writes “Everyone knows // what happens to women // who hitchhike, constantly // trying a door to the other world made of lake / bottom or low forest, abandoned house // even wild animals / have rejected.” The result is a queering of On the Road, a feminist Frank Stanford at once vulnerable and canny. Richly textured, In the Volcano’s Mouth is an extraordinary portrait of life on the enchanted margins.

Genres: Poetry

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2016

About the author

Miriam Bird Greenberg is the author of In the Volcano's Mouth, winner of the 2015 Agnes Lynch Starrett Prize from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and of two previous chapbooks—All night in the new country (Sixteen Rivers) and Pact-Blood, Fevergrass (Ricochet Editions).

She has been recognized with fellowships from the NEA, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, and the Poetry Foundation. A former Wallace Stegner Fellow, she lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, where for many years she collaboratively developed site-specific performances for very small audiences. She's currently working on an ethnographically derived poetry project about economic migrants and asylum seekers living in and around Hong Kong's Chungking Mansions.

Reviews

[koehler · Rating 5 out of 5]

Somehow dark and glittering at the same time, a truly outstanding collection.

[Ianna Chia · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had the privilege of taking a documentary poetry class under Miriam, and as I was reading this collection, I could see threads of what she taught (like making settings vivid with integrity). It's a wonderful collection about travelling, life in flux, and the magic that comes with discovery.

[Natasha · Rating 5 out of 5]

An unusual, rangy book of fluid poems that are so clear you spend your energy admiring the way they are made.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dystopian countryside haunts. Post-apocalyptic fables surrounded by animal bones and wet blades. Like if Cormac McCarthy raised goats. Every poem is a 2-5 page poem. Epic, ambient poems. Journeys that demand a knapsack and a compass.