Books
— Poetry Collections —
Dogged
University of Massachusetts Press, 2022
Located somewhere between fiction and reality, the animals of Dogged exist as both “creatures children see in their fevers” and “your one / good dream / in the night.” Inhabiting a space apart from time and narrative, the space of the ever-elusive now, these haunting poems probe animal consciousness and desire, as “howls float / like crocuses— / violet / and half open / to the unknown.”
Looking to a wide range of high and low visual media, from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws and Animal Planet’s Fatal Attractions to Peter Paul Rubens’s painting of Hercules’s dog discovering Tyrian purple, Stacy Gnall ponders human-animal connections and divisions, exploring those moments when human voices blend with “silent” beasts to exceed the limits of language. In Dogged, animals emerge as the highest aspiration of poetry.
“Gnall intertwines with, and submerges her voice in the voices of the animal so thoroughly that it is deliberately and wonderfully difficult to tease one from the other. An eloquent imagination informs every page of Dogged, in which the exploration of otherness is moving, enlarging, and surprising in a way very few books are.”
– Lynn Emanuel, author of
The Nerve of It: Poems New and Selected
“Not since Marianne Moore has an American poet given voice to the thrum and thrill of the creaturely, to the motives and meanings of creation in its poignant complexity, with such unguarded candor. With Dogged, Stacy Gnall shows herself to be an indispensable poet, and we can only be grateful.”
– Donald Revell, author of
White Campion and The English Boat
“‘Each time I build a fire, / I will tell your story, // the sound of my own voice thrown / over logs’ writes Stacy Gnall in her captivating second book. Here is poetry interested in mystery not on a superficial level, but in a deep, surprising, enchanting way. The images and insight of these poems have stayed with me long after I have read them. This is a brilliant second act. Bravo!”
– Ilya Kaminsky, author of
Deaf Republic: Poems
Heart First into the Forest
Alice James Books, 2011
This debut collection wanders into the dark, enchanted territory of childhood fables. Poems are parables peopled with archetypes, birthing a world of spells and curses, of daughters betrayed by their own blood, of children vanishing in the woods, and, through it all, a singular heroine gradually emerging to triumph—her mind a butcher's block, her feet sprinting toward the twist. With decadent fairy-tale rhetoric, wild child Stacy Gnall depicts a harrowing coming of age, luring us to indulge our anima.
“Gnall's debut takes such delight in the musicality of language that at times it is enough to simply hear her lines: ‘a stone, a callow Jonah, / now solemn as if going to school //... sees each stitch in the line / from scripture, the stomach now // skeins of skin.’ In poems populated with damsels, lace-keepers, and ‘beastly embezzlers,’ Gnall threads the lyric through the fantastic, creating a collection that is as boisterous and stark as it is macabre.”
– Publishers Weekly
“Heart First into the Forest intoxicates with high altitude, mesmerizing, razor eloquence. Gnall’s debut is a tightrope of risky equipoise, of embodied metaphor, bristling insight and gut.”
– Susan McCabe, author of
Cinematic Modernism and Descartes’ Nightmare
“With her exquisite lyric delicacy, Stacy Gnall brings a constant music and a candid, luminous perspective to every poem.”
– David St. John, author of
The Last Troubadour and The Window
“It’s a rare pleasure to discover a young poet, or any other kind, so fully in possession of her craft.”
– Joel Brouwer, author of
Off Message and And So
— Anthologies —
Lit from Inside: 40 Years of Poetry from Alice James Books
Alice James Books, 2013
Featuring the poem “Self-portrait as Thousandfurs”
A compilation of archival materials accompanies this collection of forty years of Alice James Books poetry. Nearly 150 authors are represented in chronological order. Maxine Kumin states, “the list of authors is remarkable for its breadth, variety, and passion. The assortment is idiosyncratic, the range of voices and styles embraces the familiar personal narrative voice and the innovative.” Contributors include Jane Kenyon, Fanny Howe, Forrest Gander, Jean Valentine, B.H. Fairchild, Matthea Harvey, Brian Turner, and Cole Swensen.
The Liddell Book of Poetry
Figueroa Press, 2013
Featuring the poem series
“Curtsey as you Fall”
The Liddell Book of Poetry is the first anthology in a series, published by the USC Libraries, of student projects submitted for the university's annual Wonderland Award over its first ten years.
Named after Alice Liddell, the titular muse of Lewis Carroll in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, the series ensures that these creative and scholarly works are available to the world of Carroll scholars and collectors.