Corporal Muse

by Allison Joseph

In Corporal Muse, poet Allison E. Joseph pulls back the curtain on her writing process, searching for (and finding) The Muse in unexpected places. These are poems of love and praise. They are time machine and magic spell. Corporal Muse is a cross-section of poetic technique so strong it conjures The Muse to wherever the reader holds this book.

Genres: Poetry

42 pages, Paperback

First published October 11, 2018

About the author

Allison Joseph (born 1967) is an American poet, editor and professor. She is author of six poetry collections, most recently, My Father's Kites: Poems (Steel Toe Books, 2010).

Born in London to parents of Jamaican heritage, Allison Joseph grew up in Toronto, Canada, and the Bronx. She graduated from Kenyon College with a B.A., and from Indiana University with an M.F.A. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, and is Director of the Young Writers Workshop at SIUC, which she founded in 1999: a four-day summer program for high school students. Many of SIUC's creative writing faculty and graduate students are involved with the workshop, and the student participants come from several states. In 1995, she was one of the founding editors of Crab Orchard Review as the magazine's poetry editor and has also worked as editor-in-chief since August 2001. She lives in Carbondale, Illinois.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Julene · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Corporal Muse" by Allison Joseph is a wonderful read. In this small chapbook, from the excellent Sibling Rivalry Press, she has a poem in almost every standard form. Including a simulation of one of my favorite poems, One Art by Elizabeth Bishop; Allison's poem "Mourning: An Art" after Elizabeth Bishop, carries the rythems and energy of the original poem in the vein of its original intent, the mourning or loss of losing what is dear to us in life. This poem moved me. But many of these poems do and it is a sweet collection.

I wish the cover were on Goodreads, because it is striking, an artistic photograph of a black woman with texturized blue painted hair and hands against guilted gold and patterned skin. It accredits Shutterstock for the photo, it is WOW. Definitely a book I will dip into and remember. Next I'm reading her book "Confessions of a Barefaced Girl," which is up for a NAAPA Image Award!

[Joseph Dante · Rating 4 out of 5]

A chapbook of poems that pay homage to the author's many sources of inspiration: books, writers, teachers, cultural figures, and poetry forms themselves (several of the poems make use of traditional forms such as abecederian, villanelle, etc.). I discovered this poet from "To Sylvia," a poem dedicated to and about Sylvia Plath, and it remains one of my favorites. You can tell Joseph values clarity in vision and language above all else, as this is her greatest strength as a writer. Highly recommend this gorgeous little book.

[Jes]

"Terrestrial," "Yesterday, We All Grew Desperate," and "Mourning: An Art" slayed me.