Full-length Poetry Collections
THESE POEMS are curated hauntings. Out of words earned by a loveliness of listening, Mara Adamitz Scrupe assembles a slightly disheveled museum of sorrows, a conference of knuckle-bones, of wolf sonnets, tractor parts, and keepsakes. In which you may find yourself wandering long ago. These poems are koans. They are oracles—they speak the kind of silence and riddle that places speak and dreams enact. This book is a reliquary; the saints hallowed by Scrupe’s playful and prayerful remembrance had no famous names, but they find them here in these delicate, Sapphic scripts. They are, these relicts, these foundlings: slaves and settlers, soldiers, wives and daughters, wolf trees, mountain laurels, white beeches, and gardens and streams. And each of them could be any one of us. These are all our bones. You will find a civil war in here; you will find farmhouses and hymns. Scrupe has a painter’s eye, a sculptor’s touch, an archivist’s mind, and an activist’s urgency of heart.
– Mark Tredinnick, winner of the Montreal International Poetry Prize
This is poetry that is intimately close to the bone. Eat the Marrow by Mara Adamitz Scrupe is tightly wrought, beautifully constructed, convincing and moving at the same time. Her phrase-making and line-breaks are razor-sharp where “a stone obelisk become a cross”, where “ a slab a quarry a crust for an incantation” sing with searing agony and delight. Here is language that is stretched to its limit, language to rejoice in and savour — an outstanding book.
– Sudeep Sen, author of Fractals (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Vintage: Penguin Random House) & The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry (editor)
The poetic voice in Beast is sometimes raw, often compassionate, frequently beautiful, consistently real, and devoid of any posturing. This is mature work crafted by a mature poet in full command of her art. I am not at all surprised that it has been awarded such a prestigious prize.
– Enda Coyle-Green, author of Map of the Last
We find in BEAST poems of relentless energy as well as hesitation, and recognize in them the halting and swerving of our lives. All the incongruous clutter of our days – the fungus and stars – weigh on the page. Scrupe’s wry humor cushions the thought of our bodies “chaffed and sloughed,” growing transparent. These crowded unflinching poems chronicle the small catastrophes and redeeming joys, the emotional commotion of life as we know it.
– John Witte, author of Disquiet