M

by Dale M. Kushner

Dale Kushner’s collection of poetry M testifies to the heroic dimensions of women’s lives. The urgent voices in these poems, including Mary Magdalene, Eve, the Virgin Mary, and women experiencing violence across centuries and continents, are bearers of the sacred into the profane world of history—of men and war. The speakers in a series of dramatic monologues explore both radical and tender moments that break through the myths perpetuated in the name of the feminine. The poems are an enduring map of how resilience is forged from suffering and how desire, loss, and struggle are the spiritual path to transformation.

M takes us on a journey through realms of soul on the paths of desire, sorrow, and transformation. It is a strong distillation of the poet’s passionate engagement with fate and destiny and a fine distillation of Dale Kushner’s passionate dedication to the deep mysteries of love in all times and places. Be brave—drink, and savor! The poems will take your breath away!

—Murray Stein, Jung’s Map of the Soul

From Eve to Mary Magdalene and through all her configurations, Dale Kushner’s M pulls us through the horrors of history in language rich with gorgeousness where “ugliness is a city of miserable thought” and “even the forsythia wears a yellow star.” Of personal loss and pain, the usual tropes of the poet, she flings us the “looping brain / trapped in its cycle of desperate / repair” to save us. Never mind Adam and the latest Hollywood hunk, here we have the true poet’s real paramour: language. One could bathe all day in the deliciousness of this book.

—Alice Friman, author of Blood Weather

Dale Kushner’s M is a book of spiritual reckoning and superb artistry, reminiscent of Rilke’s great New Poems volumes. Beginning with revisionist retellings of the Expulsion and the life of Mary Magdalene, the collection then circles outward to include a wide array of monologues and character studies as well as some moving elegies for the author’s father. M also is a marvelously cohesive collection, unified by its empathy, by the power of its witnessing, and by its devotional ardor. As Kushner writes in the closing poem, “This wasn’t the underworld. I was ascending /and everything demanded an upward gaze.”

—David Wojahn, For The Scribe

Dale Kushner’s remarkable M transports us into the regions of the underworld and overworld where desire’s destructive and generative impulses cannot be suppressed. The inventive substance and form of these poems is startling, satisfying at all times: there are poems here of “mad prayer” and of fabular horror/wonder and of stinging remembering and of outcry and of despairing questioning. M’s three sections, “Via Desiderio,” “Via Dolorosa,” and “Via Transformativa,” build in intensity, offering a rare experience of mysticism. This book of poems is, to say it simply, absolutely original.

—Kevin McIlvoy, author of One Kind Favor

Genres: Poetry

99 pages, Paperback

First published February 19, 2022

About the author

Dale M. Kushner grew up in New Jersey and moved to the Midwest to study at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is a recipient of a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant in the Literary Arts and has been honored by a fellowship to the Wurlitzer Foundation, The Ragdale Foundation, and the Fetzer Institute as a participant of their first Writers’ Conference on Compassion and Forgiveness. Her work has been widely published in literary journals including IMAGE, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, Salmagundi, Witness, Fifth Wednesday and elsewhere. Her most recent poetry collection More Alive Than Lions Roaring was a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award at Utah State Press and The Prairie Schooner Book Competition. In 2010 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Ms. Kushner has studied at the C. G. Jung Institute in Zurich and has an ongoing interest in Buddhism and spiritual life. She lives with her husband in Madison, Wisconsin. The Conditions of Love is her first novel.

Reviews

[Dwight Allen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dale Kushner's new book of poems has what her wonderful first novel, The Conditions of Love, also has: empathy, tenderness, curiosity, and an artist's drive to understand and depict human suffering and joy in some of its many varieties. From the stunning violence of the first poem, which imagines the first coupling of the Bible's first couple, to the quiet final poem, in which the poet crosses a darkening landscape toward "knowledge of dissolution" and new life, Kushner's passionate scrutiny animates every subject she touches. She is fearless, too, taking the risk, in the middle section of the book, of writing dramatic monologues in the voices of women from different centuries and different countries enduring wars and hurricanes and the savagery of men. She is a close observer of the human body ("skin/ like linen pounded over rocks") and she writes about nature with a freshness that can make you smell it. In a poem about Mary Magdalene wandering the hills of Galilee, contemplating the death of Jesus, Mary is surprised by desire, "sharp as the juice of wild onions on her fingers." In the third and last section of the book, Kushner's gaze turns inward, toward her parents and her own childhood and, in a long and powerful poem called "One World," to a moment just before her conception. That moment is August 6, 1945, when America dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and when the poet's mother is at a New Jersey beach, watching a daughter build sand castles and wishing for a second child. Some decades later, this second daughter writes, in a moment of hope, "The mind leaps free without its winding sheet." Dale Kushner's mind leaps free throughout, showing us the heart of what she sees.--Dwight Allen

[Scott Wiggerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Start to finish, an enthralling read. Each of three sections delivers in different ways--the first covers Biblical M's: Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary, as well as Eve. The second shifts to persona of women whose name starts with an M, ranging around the globe across countries and centuries. The third is more personal, including a character named Mimi whom I suspect is the M of Dale M. What connects all the sections is gorgeous language (I've probably underlined a third of the book!) and ponderous ideas. Hard to believe this is a first book of poetry! Not often do I finish a book and immediately start rereading it, even slower the second time--but this book is that amazing!

[Phyllis · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the first section, Dale Kushner's sensibility of women and their subtle and not so subtle influence on the happenings of this world is very powerful. Then, from her fascinating view of biblical women, her poetry branches into unlikely places and envelops the reader intensely. She has a deep knowledge of the strange and unpredictable workings of people's minds. This understanding continued to surprise and astound me, even. What a beautiful book, inside and out. Its cover is outstanding.