Rough Cradle
Betsy Sholl
Available April 2009
Sholl's masterful, musical seventh collection focuses on human dichotomies: body and soul, mystery and knowledge, grief and ecstasy. Though the self is small in relation to death, love is enormous, and no life too small or mean to matter. Rough Cradle entreats us to love everything before we lose everything.
"Betsy Sholl's work has such fiery momentum and narrative drive that her poems seize her readers' attention and never let go, drawing us into a profound contemplation of the marriage of blessing and destruction the world offers again and again."
—Mark Doty
"Betsy Sholl's Rough Cradle is a marvelous, intricate book of contraries. Ruin and healing, beauty and blight, the just and the unjust are at war, not just out there in our politics and our histories, but in here, daily, hourly, in the human soul. I love Sholl's unyielding honesty, the great heart and deep intelligence of her vision."
—Nancy Eimers
"For Betsy Sholl, words don't merely bring us to the edge of life's mysteries, they enter those places and—if not 'solve' things—listen, lament, praise, become song. Everything can turn into poetry, if one can only find the right words, the right music. Over and over, Sholl does. Urgent, compassionate, and lyrical, this is poetry of the highest order."
—Theodore Deppe
about the author
Betsy Sholl, a founding member of Alice James Books, is the author of six previous collections of poetry, most recently Late Psalm. Her awards include the AWP Prize for Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Maine Art Commission. In 2006 she was named Poet Laureate of Maine. She teaches at the University of Southern Maine and in the Vermont College MFA in Writing Program.
Author photo by Hannah Tarkinson
