Spire Author: Alice Pettway

Alice Pettway is a former Lily Peter fellow, Raymond L. Barnes Poetry Award winner, and two-time Pushcart Prize nominee. She has published work in The Bitter Oleander, The Connecticut Review, Crab Creek Review, Di-Verse-City, Lullwater Review, The Mid-America Poetry Review, Women’s Voices for Change and others. Alice received her M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Arkansas. She and her husband, AJ, will be volunteering in Mozambique with the U.S. Peace Corps until December 2011.

We are pleased to announce inSPIREd Poetry Series featuring Barbed Wire and Bed Clothes by Alice Pettway!

Order the first seven (7) selections in the inSPIREd Poetry Series + a bonus notebook for only $45.

*As always, there are no shipping charges if you order
directly from Spire Press.

Alice Pettway’s Barbed Wire and Bedclothes explores the familiar and finds it all akimbo and sharp-elbowed. A daughter confronts her mother, conjuring her own fetal anger: “could you feel the pulse of my resentment?” and cringes at her mother’s “every glance, a confirmation of failure.” Love itself is a “struggle” here, “flint-sharp.” Even the body is at war with itself, menaced by mastectomy, threatening dissolution. And yet the rough-and-tumble of real life is rewarded by the knowledge that “those who have treasured / their battles and blunders / will never do battle alone.” These poems are terse, precise, evocative, and sensuous; to anyone grown timid or lazy or comfortable, they send a challenge: “cut the barbed wire now and chance the landmines.”

There are a lot of good things to say about the poems of Alice Pettway. Probably what sets them apart more than any other virtue is the subtle but insistent sense of irony they convey—one of the rarest and most valuable aspects of any art, but especially of poetry.