{"product_id":"9781556591686","title":"Bitters","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eBitters\u003c\/i\u003e is an extended quarrel with God, driven by the desire to recover what is banished to the marginal and apocryphal. In her third collection Seiferle claims whatever originates in the earth as an emissary of the divine, whether it is a starving boy in a supermarket or the maggots thriving in the skin of a cat.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003ci\u003e \u003cb\u003eSeraphim\u003c\/b\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEven houseflies must have their angels.\u003cbr\u003e Principalities, at knee or elbow, the voice of God caught within an ear, at such a pitch,\u003cbr\u003e it makes the skull hum. And if I swat them,\u003cbr\u003e can they blame me? Like all good messengers,\u003cbr\u003e they're just testing whether we are still alive.\u003cbr\u003e By such means, the priest taught me,  \"God creates.\u003cbr\u003e All the living and the dead, just a nursery\u003cbr\u003e for his hatching.\" \u003ci\u003eSo when I found a trinity of maggots in the abdominal wall of a living kitten, though I had to pinch them out, I could not blame them—Shadrach,\u003cbr\u003e Meshach, Abednego, pale witnesses of a homesick God, caught in the furnace of the flesh, hoping to sprout wings.\u003c\/i\u003e \u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAgainst the background and harsh light of the desert Southwest or withing the darkness of European history and religion, Seiferle has created a new kind of beauty: tragic, wise, open to every possibility. And just as the liquor of the title are colorful, earthy draughts of distilled spirits with an ancient medicinal history, so too are they a fitting metaphor for these darkly humorous and curative poems.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e \u003cb\u003eRebecca Seiferle\u003c\/b\u003e 's \u003ci\u003eThe Music We Dance To \u003c\/i\u003e was nominated for the Pulitzer prize and poems from the volume are included in \u003ci\u003eThe Best American Poetry 2000.\u003c\/i\u003e Her first book, \u003ci\u003eThe Ripped-Out Seam \u003c\/i\u003e won the Bogin Memorial, the Writers' Exchange, and the Writers' Union Poetry Prize. Her translation of Cesar Vallejo's \u003ci\u003eTrilce \u003c\/i\u003e won the 1992 PenWest Translation Award. She lives in Farmington, NM.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Copper Canyon Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47053692764400,"sku":"9781556591686","price":14.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781556591686_p0.jpg?v=1763754985","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781556591686","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}