Oberlin College Press

Angie Estes

ENCHANTEE

Paper $15.95 (ISBN 978-0932440-419)

Winner of the 2015 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award.

Winner of the 2014 Audre Lorde Prize for Lesbian Poetry from the Publishing Triangle.

Angie Estes' TRYST was named one of two finalists for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, as "a collection of poems remarkable for its variety of subjects, array of genres and nimble use of language." Her new book is another glittering demonstration of her gifts.

***

Angie Estes has recently created some of the most beautiful verbal objects on the planet.
--Stephen Burt, Boston Review

Enchantée is a dazzling book of metamorphoses. At first, Angie Estes' words stand out bright as silver tacks on the page, and in the next instant her words shift and glide, turn sinuous, and trail in their wake startling perceptions about memory, sorrow, innocence, and knowledge. Any one of Estes' poems may remind us of a gorgeous hanging garden—until the poem spans distances and evokes a sky starred with constellations. And then, in a blink, the poem shifts shape yet again.
--Lee Upton

Enchantée: you will be, when you meet these poems. The enchantment has to do with incantation: the way Angie Estes puts experience into song. She lets words take the initiative, as Mallarmé said poets must, to see where the secret logic of sound will lead. Ricocheting among languages, places, and time periods, the play is plangent, tinged by nostalgia historical and personal. But Estes is too fascinated with what is happening on the page, and the next one after that, too interested in poetry's potential, to get hung up about the past. This is a poetry of style, elegance, and fresh surprise, for the ear and the eye, the heart and the mind. It reminds me why I read.
--Langdon Hammer

Dark Spots

In the late nineteenth century, some photographers

claimed not only to capture images
of loved ones from beyond

the grave but to be able to photograph memories

of the deceased, their auras still glowing
around the bereaved,

as if to capture light reflected off a body could preserve

that body over time, as Beatrice explains
the presence of the dark

spots on the moon to Dante in Paradiso: how

the brightness of a celestial body
reveals the angelic

gladness that quickens the body, letizia that shines as joy

shines through an eye. Visit Fort
Courage—Take Pictures

of the Past, the billboards across Arizona advised,

and at the base of the mountain in
New Mexico, a note taped

to the gasoline pump read, Hold tight to your money—the wind

will carry it away. In the snapshot of
my grandmother in her

casket, wearing the Elizabethan collar and permed

curls she never wore, my mother
gazes through her

to a planet she always knew existed but which, without

the darkness, she could never see
before. They call

some bruises shiners like the violet stars of the Rose of Sharon

that come out in the morning and shine
all day in their leaf-black

shade, shade carved into the yard like fish scales covering

the sarcophagus in Sant’Apollinare in
Classe near Ravenna

or the stiff, veined hands of the sycamore stretched wide

in applause, the Italian gesture
of mourning.