A Marriage Book. James P. Lenfestey
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Praise for James P. Lenfestey’s A Marriage Book
“These tender, sly, plainspoken poems are a profound (and sexy) hymn to a long marriage. Lenfestey writes of domestic matters, yes, but the poems are most definitely undomesticated. They tell a thousand small secrets in an extended meditation on love and all its consequences. They also chart the history of a complex emotion over many years, which I found fascinating. Tonally nuanced, fresh and far-ranging, the voice in these poems is a delight.”
— CHASE TWICHELL
“In this age of cynicism, or at the very least irony, it is good to come upon a book that celebrates marriage and family without either sentimentality or ambivalence. ‘So much poetry is about storms, / bruised fruit, locusts eating everything,’ Lenfestey writes. ‘This poem is about a harvest that satisfies.’”
— LINDA PASTAN
“Warning Label: prepare to be shaken, moved, amused, terrified, relieved, delighted. Take in small doses or one large gulp; either way, you will be healed. These poems are alive with many things: stories, images, metaphors, but more than anything else they are alive with rhythm. These are poems of mutual passion, but also of heartbreak and solitude. In the final stanza of ‘My Wife Sleeping as I Drive,’ Lenfestey writes: ‘We plunge along our course of earth, / each alert in our own way, / ahead the blue-black sky full / of oncoming lights and stars.’ How amazing that we have been invited along for the ride!”
— JIM MOORE
“Think of Lenfestey’s A Marriage Book as a talking photo album or an unfolding epithalamium. The lovers meet and marry; the children arrive and grow up. Along the way, there are days of joy and anxious nights, sweetness and humor. The narrator is a courageous ‘captain,’ an ‘old shepherd / exhausted with tending,’ and a ‘Marco Polo,’ but like his predecessors, he always returns to his center, his wife, who is (as he says) his life. What a fine tribute to fifty years of real-world love!”
— JOYCE SUTPHEN
“Lenfestey’s poems encircle a marriage while opening it out into the depths and heights with tenderness—I might say reverence—and grace. The poems move from outer rituals into the interior world of the self that wants to make sense of birth, joy, damage, death, and grief, but can’t, entirely. You want to know how it is to stay through the long haul? Look to these poems. ‘It is gravity, / which limits us totally, / which makes all life possible,’ Lenfestey writes. These are the poems of a brave heart and a skilled poet. They will make you want to kiss your sweetheart.”
— FLEDA BROWN
“I’ve been an avid reader of Lenfestey’s work for many years. His Seeking the Cave was a wonder, and so is his Marriage Book, a collection rooted in passion, desire, sensuality, and the ‘shared heat’ of love. This is, above all, a book of transcendence, of celebration. Containing a wealth of extraordinary poems, it appears to have been conceived in a beautiful sustained burst of illumination, with Lenfestey overlapping his themes to create a collection so seamless it could well be read as one long poem. This is a truly superb book, an absolute joy to read.”
— ROBERT HEDIN
“I just finished reading A Marriage Book straight through. Such a treasure. Virtuosic, with all the different moods and colors and shadings and statements and counterstatements, and so beautiful. A very wonderful book.”
— ELIZABETH GORDON MCKIM
“These generous poems, attractive in their emotional directness, confident in their subject matter, bring us into contact with the intimacies of an intensely lived life, insisting both on their frequent joys—there is playfulness, there is fervor—and on disclosing the vulnerabilities that demanding relationships reveal in us over the decades.”
— MICHAEL DENNIS BROWNE
ALSO BY JAMES P. LENFESTEY
POETRY
Earth in Anger: Twenty-Five Poems of Love and Despair for Planet Earth
A Cartload of Scrolls: One Hundred Poems in the Manner of T’ang Dynasty Poet Han-Shan
Into the Goodhue County Jail: Poems to Free Prisoners
The Toothed and Clever World
Saying Grace
Odalisque
Low Down and Coming On: A Feast of Delicious and Dangerous Poems about Pigs (editor)
If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems (editor)
NONFICTION
The Urban Coyote: Howlings on Family, Community and the Search for Peace and Quiet
Robert Bly in This World (coeditor)
Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain
© 2017, Text by James P. Lenfestey
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher: Milkweed Editions, 1011 Washington Avenue South, Suite 300, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55415.
(800) 520-6455
Published 2017 by Milkweed Editions
Printed in the United States of America
Cover design by Mary Austin Speaker
Author photo by Larry Marcus
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First Edition
Milkweed Editions, an independent nonprofit publisher, gratefully acknowledges sustaining support from the Jerome Foundation; the Lindquist & Vennum Foundation; the McKnight Foundation; the National Endowment for the Arts; the Target Foundation; and other generous contributions from foundations, corporations, and individuals. Also, this activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a Minnesota State Arts Board Operating Support grant, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund, and a grant from Wells Fargo. For a full listing of Milkweed Editions supporters, please visit milkweed.org.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lenfestey, James P., author.
Title: A marriage book / James P. Lenfestey.
Description: First edition. | Minneapolis, Minnesota: Milkweed Editions,
2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017039309 | ISBN 9781571314925 (pbk.: alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Marriage--Poetry.
Classification: LCC PS3612.E528 A6 2017 | DDC 811/.6--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039309
Milkweed Editions is committed to ecological stewardship. We strive to align our book production practices with this principle, and to reduce the impact of our operations in the environment. We are a member of the Green Press Initiative, a nonprofit coalition of publishers, manufacturers, and authors working to protect the world’s endangered forests and conserve natural resources. A Marriage