Magdalena
Magdalena: Prose Poems
by Maureen Gibbon
Magdalena is a finely-drawn collection of prose poems which, with sometime painful honesty, examine the vagaries and vicissitudes of a heart in conflict with itself. Eros, the erotic world, is never far from the poet's mnd: "each spring brought new hands touching my body." The poems invoke the nature of an independent woman embracing her own sexuality, her travels, and being in the world.
About the Author
Maureen Gibbon is the author of Magdalena, volume 10 in the Marie Alexander Poetry Series, and the novels Swimming Sweet Arrow and Thief. A graduate of Barnard College and the Iowa Writer's Workshop, Gibbon was awarded a Bush Foundation Artist Fellowship in 2001 and Loft McKnight Artist Fellowships in 1992 and 1999. In 2006, she received a Mill Foundation Artist Residency at the Santa Fe Arts Institute.
Magdalena (originally titled Kicking Horse My True Husband) was a finalist for the Yale Series of Younger Poets and National Poetry Series in 1995 and 1996, and the Agnes Starret Lynch/University of Pittsburgh Press prize in 1999.
Gibbon's novels have been published internationally and she has had work appear in The New York Times, The Daily Mail, Playboy, Minneapolis Star Tribune, Pitsburgh Post-Gazette, Psychologies, California Quarterly, Water~Stone Review, and on nerve.com and basenotes.net. Her fiction has been translated into French, German, Norwegian, Spanish and Hungarian; an Italian edition of Thief is forthcoming from Bompiani.
She lives in northern Minnesota and is at work on a new novel set in 19th century Paris.
Accolades
“Magdalena is honest and alive with erotic poems that began to simmer when the poet ‘was 16 and hungry all the time.’”
“Much of Gibbon’s power is exhibited through her ‘confessional’ mode of poetry.…she is as adept a weaver of others’ stories as she is of her own.
”
“Often pairing the girly with the nomadic and the fragile with the aggressive.…”
