Covet

(Paperback)

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Description

covet (k\u00fah-vit)v. tr.: to desire, esp. to desire eagerly, to wish for, long for. As in to covet anotherAEs belongings, the ghosts of households and fixtures, their voices or warnings. Ex: she coveted the fine table, the rich furnishings of her neighborAEs home. As in to covet the past, a lost year, a lost life or one not lived. Ex: turning the

Reviews

Great beauty, these poems understand, often steals in unexpectedly--the bird through the window, the forsythia that erupts out of a wintry landscape. Again and again we encounter here "the breath of the ecstatic", hearts "filled to bursting" "rush[ing] and skip[ping," "thumping in [their] box[es]." Edwards knows how quickly the visions she seeks to capture fade to "ordinary pain." The trick--one these lovely poems manage over and over--is to be the camera "shutter's click and whir, imperceptible / as hummingbird's wings." I finished these poems grateful for their acts of thievery, their coveting. What a beautiful and accomplished book.
- Davis McCombs

Lynnell Edwards' new collection of finely wrought poems invites us to join her pacing the quotidian, where the objects and furniture of other peoples' lives can be as covetous as ghosts. Here we find ourselves settled and unsettled, able to touch the absence in the passages of joy. Such things as coyotes and domestic life are faced with wry humor and a "salted grace, " and an age-dulled prism becomes a "lost slipper of light." This fine poet's ability to "see into the life of things," as Wordsworth put it, makes her third book a quiet revelation and a necessary read.
-David Mason, Ludlow and News From The Village

Lynnell Edwards's third poetry collection, Covet, is a fascinating, wide-ranging examination of desire. From the small and antique--a "Tinderbox Chamberstick w/Flint and Cover," say, to the middle distance of "Available Light" and everyday life, to the wild freedom of turkey vultures "soaring / each spring over Pine Mountain," her poems are witty, lyrical, commonsensical, and marvelously bold. This is a book worth coveting.
--Kelly Cherry, The Retreats of Thought: Poems

Author Bio

Lynnell Major Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, Covet (2012), The Highwayman's Wife (2007) and The Farmer's Daughter (2003), all from Red Hen Press. Her book reviews and short fiction have been published nationally in such journals as Pleiades, The Hollins Critic, Connecticut Review, American Book Review, and New Madrid. She is Associate Professor of English at Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. She also writes a books column for Louisville Magazine and is Board member of InKY, inc. sponsor of the monthly literary reading series InKY, which she co-produces.