All We Have is Our Voice by Carole Stone

$17.00

ALL WE HAVE IS OUR VOICE gives voice to artists, writers, and musicians, figures from myth and fairy tales. In her persona poems, Stone speaks most frequently in the voice of wives of famous husbands, such as Frau Freud, Mrs, Lincoln, Sonya Tolstoi, Mary Hemingway and women who were unrecognized for their own talents like Nina Grieg. The book also celebrates men and women who achieved success, Mary Shelley, Frida Kahlo, Cesar Vallejo, Raymond Carver, imagining them at stages of their lives. She then speaks in her own voice to celebrate the poets and artists she loves and who have influenced her: Hart Crane, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg. Ultimately ALL WE HAVE IS OUR VOICE is a compendium of Stone’s taste throughout her years of reading and writing poems.

Description

  • Kind: Perfectbound
  • Pages: 74
  • Language: English
  • Date Published: August, 2018
  • ISBN 978-1-948017-21-3

Praise

In All We Have is Our Voice, Carole Stone’s fierce dramatic monologues, delivered by the wives and lovers of such titans as Tolstoy, Lincoln, Freud, Yeats, Joyce, and (Dylan)Thomas, incisively protest patriarchal privilege and exploitation. Taut ekphrastic poems aptly probe the artistic struggles and transports of Kahlo, Schiele, Chagall, (Lucien) Freud, and others. And Stone also pays heartfelt tribute to literary figures such as Vallejo, Crane, Akhmadulina and Ratushinskaya who encounter extremity.’ —Thomas Fink

“Carole Stone’s poetry is from the heart sophisticated; it contains multitudes and provides for the unexpected.” —Lucas Hunt

Excerpt

Mary Shelley Beside Mary Wollstonecraft’s Grave

They say a woman could not have written
such a tale, that it is a ghost story
I overheard the men telling

the stormy night we matched wits —
Percy, Lord Byron and Coleridge —
three geniuses and me.

My maker, my muse, who left me
motherless at my birth,
I create a creature, unnatural, wild dark.

Here is my book, monster with the dull eye,
yellow skin that hardly covers his muscles
and arteries; my shriveled, nameless, infant child.

Author

Carole StoneCarole Stone is Distinguished Professor of English and creative writing, emerita, Montclair State University. Her poetry collections include  LATE; HURT, THE SHADOW; AMERICAN RHAPSODY; and TRAVELING WITH THE DEAD. Critical essays on writers include Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sylvia Plath and George Eliot. She received three Fellowships from The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, a fellowship to Rothermere Institute, Oxford University, UK, as well as residencies at Hawthornden Writers Retreat, Scotland and Chateau de Lavigny, Switzerland. She divides her time between Springs, East Hampton, New York and Verona, New Jersey.

Additional information

Weight 6.3 oz
Dimensions 9 × 6 × .25 in