Tourists in the Known World; New and Selected Poems (Paperback)

Description

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Kristen Lindquist’s new collection of poems, “Tourists in the Known World,” is a welcome reminder of what one of Maine’s best practicing poets has been up to persistently for years at her home in Camden: making authentic translations of the directly experienced world into poetry.

What you get from the atmosphere, mood and figuration of her poems is a sense not just of awe, good humor, complicated affinities and occasional chafing Thoreau-like irony, but also the feeling that everything the poem is made of is coming through without calculation, without artifice. This is tricky phrasing, because a lack of artifice is not a lack of art. Lindquist has an unusually deft feel for language — especially for the subtle rhythms we prefer in our poetry nowadays. Her phrasing is refreshingly authentic to the way we speak, yet more precise than much of the high literary language characteristic of poets operating out of more academic, workshop-oriented milieus.

About the Author

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Kristen Lindquist attended Middlebury College in Vermont and received her MFA in poetry from the University of Oregon. She worked many summers at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference. Her poetry and other writings have appeared in such venues as Down East, Maine Times, Bangor Metro, Northern Sky News, and Bangor Daily News, as well as various literary journals and anthologies. Her publications include the chapbook Invocation to the Birds (Oyster River Press, 2001), Transportation (Megunticook Press, 2011), which was a finalist for a Maine Literary Award, and Tourists in the Known World: New & Selected Poems (Megunticook Press, 2017). She participated in the Belfast Poetry Festival in 2010, paired with artist Beth Henderson, and in 2014, when she won the Maine Postmark Poetry Contest (chosen by Gary Lawless). Her work has received other awards, as well, including the Bread Loaf Poetry Prize (chosen by Robert Pack and Carol Oles) and runner-up for Maine Writers & Publishers Alliance's Penobscot Watershed Poetry Prize (chosen by Baron Wormser). Garrison Keillor has read three of her poems on National Public Radio’s The Writer’s Almanac. She has written a natural history column for the local paper for many years (currently for Pen Bay Pilot; read a recent column here; find links to others at the end) and since 2009 has maintained a daily haiku blog, Book of Days. An avid birder since childhood, Kristen served as the first female member of the Maine Bird Records Committee. She has guided around Maine for such organizations as Maine Audubon, Friends of Baxter State Park, Coastal Mountains Land Trust, and the Acadia Birding Festival. She currently serves on the Town of Camden's Budget Committee, on the board of Merryspring Nature Center, as chair of the Maine Community Foundation's Knox County Fund, and as the treasurer of West Bay Rotary. She lives in her hometown of Camden, Maine, with her husband, novelist Paul Doiron.

Praise For…

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"To really live in this world, you should love this world, celebrate it, sing about it, know the wind, the sky, the songs of the birds, know your own heart. Birds fly through these poems, poems by a woman who knows her world, knows her heart. She says, 'I mark my life with birds," "This is life in motion"—and we move with her, happy to follow wherever she wants to take us."

--Gary Lawless, author of CARIBOU PLANET

"TOURISTS IN THE KNOWN WORLD is cause for celebration. This richly satisfying collection has it all: alert clarity, reverence, an unflinching eye, and achingly matter-of-fact levity. Her work has a powerful sense of place and an emotional honesty that lights these well-crafted poems like a lantern... I love these poems—so clear-eyed and artful. Go ahead, be a tourist, visit her poetic world. You'll be glad you did."

--Dave Morrison, author of CLUBLAND and FAIL

"Kristen Lindquist responds to the provocations of memory and desire with spirit and grace. Her poems are tuned to the seasons, to birds and their songs, to the heavens and the ground beneath her bare feet. She partakes of the natural world, conjuring mink frogs and the god of sea ducks. These poems are also about places—Chinatown, Monhegan, the gym—and about moonlight, black holes, and the Embers of Vesuvius. Be taken in."

--Carl Little, author of OCEAN DRINKER: NEW & SELECTED POEMS