Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood, born 1939 in Ottawa, Canada, is a force to be reckoned with in 20th and 21st Century literature. She grew up in northern Ontario and Quebec and in Toronto. Her education was Canadian with a salting of graduate work at Radcliffe and Harvard in the US. She can turn a skilled hand to short stories, poetry, essays and reviews, and novels. She is an enthusiastic transgressor of categories, so-called literary genres, and she is generous with introductions, forewords, and prefaces to other writers. She wants to comprehend it all, and she wants her readers to keep up.
I was very fortunate to support Atwood when she gave a talk at Dickinson College, providing books and sales support after her presentation. We had a chance to really talk. I was amazed by her sophisticated grasp of the book business (most writers really don’t care, which I think is odd). She was keen, alert, full of questions, interested. We seemed to hit it off as cousin-professionals. I always appreciate her for it and am grateful for her generosity.
Morning in the Burned House: New Poems
Morning in the Burned House: New Poems
The renowned poet and author of The Handmaid’s Tale “brings a swift, powerful energy” to this “intimate and immediate” poetry collection (Publishers Weekly).
These beautifully crafted poems — by turns dark, playful, intensely moving, tender, and intimate — make up Margaret Atwood's most accomplished and versatile gathering to date, "setting foot on the middle ground / between body and word."
Some draw on history, some on myth, both classical and popular. Others, more personal, concern themselves with love, with the fragility of the natural world, and with death, especially in the elegiac series of meditations on the death of a parent. But they also inhabit a contemporary landscape haunted by images of the past.
Generous, searing, compassionate, and disturbing, this poetry rises out of human experience to seek a level between luminous memory and the realities of the everyday, between the capacity to inflict and the strength to forgive.