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Parallel Press Publishes The Edge of Damage
Posted 01/06/2010
MADISON, Wis. – “The therapist suggests moving inward / what a kind of attention one gives the horizon / when waiting for the rain. / The redrawing
of your map.” Heather Swan’s poems in The Edge of Damage, reflect on life’s challenges and how we can survive in a world that can be at times, excruciatingly painful and excruciatingly beautiful. Water, “Our withered bodies, / once as supple / as the leopards / sleeping nearby, / rock slowly / without words / in the arms / of the ocean,” illuminates her sense of healing and growth. Swan looks beyond the “edge of damage” to see that “when a tea bowl / cracks in the fire, / that crack is filled / with gold.”
Heather Swan has an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and has been the recipient of The Wisconsin Center for the Book Bookmark Award, the August Derleth Award, a Martha Meier Renk Fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship Finalist Award. Her poems have appeared in The Cream City Review, Iris, Mothering Magazine, Dossier Journal, Outlet, Forward, Wisconsin People and Ideas, The Wisconsin Poet Calendar, and The Comstock Review, among others.
Parallel Press is an imprint of the University of Wisconsin–Madison Libraries. For more information, please visit http://parallelpress.library.wisc.edu/chapbooks/poetry/.
Orders may be sent to:
The Parallel Press
372 Memorial Library
728 State Street
Madison, WI 53706
Phone: (608) 262-2600
A selection for her chapbook, The Edge of Damage:
Bowl
for my mother
From the mud in her hands,
the bowl was born.
Opening like a flower
in an arch of petals,
then becoming a vessel
both empty and full.
Later, in the kiln
it was ravaged by fire,
its surface etched and vitrified,
searing the glaze into glass
as its body turned
to stone.
It is at the edge of damage
that beauty is honed.
And in Japan,
the potter tells me,
when a tea bowl
cracks in the fire,
that crack is filled
with gold.
