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Book Title

Divide These

Subtitle
Poems
Author 1
Saskia Hamilton
Cover Image
Divide These
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  • “Divide These is superb.”—Poetry
Body
We will get through this.
We might not get through this.
The body changes imperceptibly,
Adjusts to gravity.
—from "The Collapse of the System"

In these spare, evocative poems, Saskia Hamilton maps the spaces between grief and longing, solitude and companionship, urban and pastoral dreamscapes, what is audible and what is visible. Out of these divides, Hamilton registers with provocative statement and echoing lyric what does and doesn't fit into the world and our conceptions of the world. As she asks in the title poem, "And then as each day clears / another away, what's to be counted on?" Must everything be torn in two? Divide These brings delicate subtlety together with riveting assertion to make an original, unsettling music.

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List Price
$17.00
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ISBN
ISBN
978-1-55597-422-0
Format
Format
Paperback
Publication Date
Publication Date
Subject
Subject
Pages
Pages
80
Trim Size
Trim Size
6 x 9
Keynote
Poet Saskia Hamilton, author of As for Dream, explores "where the pull of reverie becomes palpable and eerily seductive"—Poetry

About the Author

Saskia Hamilton
Credit: Jacqueline Mia Foster
Saskia Hamilton (1967-2023) was the author of four collections of poetry, As for Dream, Divide These, Corridor, and All Souls. She was the editor of several volumes of poetry and letters, including The Letters of Robert Lowell, and was the co-editor of Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Her edition of The Dolphin Letters, 1970–1979: Elizabeth Hardwick, Robert Lowell, and Their Circle received the Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism from the Poetry Foundation and the Morton N. Cohen Award for a Distinguished Edition of Letters from the Modern Language Association. She was also the recipient of an Arts and Letters Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She taught for many years at Barnard College. 
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Praise

  • “Hamilton’s writing has been called spare and delicate, but neither of these quite gets at the effect of her poems, which are delicate only in the way a suspension bridge is: neither is marked by unnecessary ornament or fragility, and it would be a mistake to regard either as anything other than rigorously tough.”—Boston Review
  • “Through graceful lines and turns, Saskia Hamilton’s poems jar. Through deft, spare, language they instruct, question, even sing.”—Pleiades
  • “In Saskia Hamilton’s As for Dream, spare, miraculously explosive lyrics track a struggle with erotic longing and renunciation and an equally transfixing immersion in family memories. What proves salvational is a wry, spirited self-chiding and a gallant, inspirational call to arms to work. The result: a sequence of supremely evocative poems.”—Alice Quinn, Bookforum
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