{"id":4979,"date":"2020-02-27T15:33:12","date_gmt":"2020-02-27T20:33:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/?post_type=product&p=4979"},"modified":"2023-04-04T12:47:15","modified_gmt":"2023-04-04T16:47:15","slug":"a-brief-history-of-fruit","status":"publish","type":"product","link":"https:\/\/blogs.uakron.edu\/uapress\/product\/a-brief-history-of-fruit\/","title":{"rendered":"A Brief History of Fruit"},"content":{"rendered":"

In A Brief History of Fruit<\/em>, Kimberly Quiogue Andrews\u2019s full-length debut, we are shuttled between the United States and the Philippines in the search for a sense of geographical and racial belonging. Driven by a restless need to interrogate the familial, environmental, and political forces that shape the self, these poems are both sensual and cerebral: full of \u201cthe beautiful science,\u201d as she puts it, of \u201cnaming: trees of one thing, then another, then yet another.\u201d Colonization, class dynamics, an abiding loneliness, and a place\u2019s titular fruit\u2014tiny Filipino limes, the frozen berries of rural America\u2014all serve as focal markers in a book that insists that we hold life\u2019s whole fragrant pollination in our hands and look directly at it, bruises and all.<\/p>\n

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About the Author<\/h3>\n

Kimberly Quiogue Andrews is a poet and literary critic. She is also the author of\u00a0BETWEEN<\/em>, winner of the New Women’s Voices Prize from Finishing Line Press. She lives in Maryland and is Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing at Washington College.<\/p>\n

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Praise for A Brief History of Fruit<\/h3>\n

This superb collection offers up history\u2014personal, familial, postcolonial, geopolitical, ecological\u2014and indeed the history of fruit, fruit as sustenance, pleasure, exploitable product, as image, parent, love, and wound. There is no eating fruit without decimating its wholeness, and it is this split, especially in regard to the speaker\u2019s bifurcated racial and cultural identity, that generates the book\u2019s intricate architecture and vitality. These are hard-won poems, fought for, lived through.<\/p>\n

\u2014Diane Seuss, author of Still Life with Two Dead Peacocks and a Girl<\/em><\/p>\n

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As devotional hymn and origin myth, A Brief History of Fruit braves our \u201clanguage \/\/ of fracture\u201d to illuminate the blossoms and bruises of family, the sweetbitterness of memory and identity. This phenomenal first book grows from a revolutionary, revelatory imagination\u2014and Kimberly Quiogue Andrews dreams and grieves with \u201cpolycrystalline\u201d vision: her poetry invites us to draw truth from the exacting beauty of those we love, and challenges us to face the sins and illusions of the monsters we inherit. Solmaz Sharif once remarked that \u201cI don\u2019t look to poems to heal, but to make the wound alive again and again and again\u201d; to experience Andrews\u2019 searching work is to bear witness to that commitment, that ferocious hope, that awe.<\/p>\n

\u2014R. A. Villanueva, author of Reliquaria<\/em><\/p>\n

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Reviews<\/h3>\n

Poets on Poets: Celebrating New Collections (Part 2)<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n