SIX

by Julie Marie Wade

Why SIX?  Because the collection is comprised of six poems.  And because the perspective in this collection shifts like a kaleidoscope, each image viewable from six possible angles.  And because these poems, like the prevalent hexagons of the natural world—honeycombs, for instance—derive strength from their compression and their accumulation. “I call six times just to be sure you heard,” this speaker announces on the first page.  These poems are also the six calls—calls to attention, calls to action, calls to account for something of our own.  The speaker in SIX is insistent, scrupulous, and unflinching as she plumbs six essential aspects of human experience that have shaped us all: art, language, desire, vocation, faith, and life-changing love.
 

Genres: Poetry

136 pages, Paperback

First published September 22, 2016

About the author

Born in Seattle in 1979, Julie Marie Wade completed a Master of Arts in English at Western Washington University in 2003, a Master of Fine Arts in Poetry at the University of Pittsburgh in 2006, and a PhD in Humanities at the University of Louisville in 2012. She has received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry (2004), the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize (2004), the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize (2005), the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award (2006), two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Poetry Prizes (2006, 2010), the AWP Intro Journals Award for Nonfiction (2009), the American Literary Review Nonfiction Prize (2010), the Arts & Letters Nonfiction Prize (2010), an Al Smith Artist Grant from the Kentucky Arts Council (2010), the Thomas J. Hruska Nonfiction Prize (2011), the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir (2011), the Bloom Nonfiction Chapbook Prize (2012), a grant from the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund (2012), and seven Pushcart Prize nominations. Julie is the author of two collections of lyric nonfiction, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures (Colgate University Press, 2010) and Small Fires (Sarabande Books, 2011); two collections of poetry, Without (Finishing Line Press, 2010) and Postage Due (White Pine Press, 2013); the creative nonfiction chapbook Tremolo: An Essay (Bloom Press, 2013); and the forthcoming When I Was Straight: Poems (A Midsummer Night's Press, 2014). She lives with her partner Angie Griffin in the Sunshine State and teaches in the creative writing program at Florida International University in Miami.

Reviews

[Dayna · Rating 4 out of 5]

What I love about this new collection from Wade is how "big tent" her poems are, with regards to form and genre--big enough to house bullet points, flash fiction fairytales, word definitions, movie summaries, quotations, a transcription of a recorded conversation between the poet and her father, scientific terminology and thinking, etc. The six poems in Six feel broad, expansive, genre-blurring, and generous.

I also love how Wade uses the technique of recurring lines that surface and resurface, haunting the poems, changing meanings depending on the context, often with eye-opening effect.

This collection reminds me of work by C.D. Wright (it's no wonder Wright chose this collection as the winner of the A Room of Her Own Foundation's To the Lighthouse Prize), as well as Carole Maso's trance-inducing texts. I'm happy to own Wade's collection, and I'm sure I'll return to it for inspiration.