I Was the Jukebox
Sandra Beasley
W. W. Norton & Company
<p>"[Beasley's] lightness works best when it dapples her darkness&#8212;and when her darkness, as it often does, feels truly deep."&#8212;Abigail Deutsch, <i>Poetry</i>The winner of the 2009 Barnard Women Poets Prize&#8212;"These poems are fresh, crisp, and muscular. They are decisive and fearless. Every object, icon, or historical moment has a soul with a voice. In these poems these soulful ones elbow their way to the surface of the page, smartly into the contemporary now."&#8212;Joy Harjo, prize citation<br/><br/>from "The Piano Speaks"<br/><i>For an hour I forgot my fat self,<br/>my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.<br/>For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.<br/>For an hour I was a salamander<br/>shimmying through the kelp in search of shore,<br/>and under his fingers the notes slid loose<br/>from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs<br/>that took root in the mud.</i></p>