Julie Sheehan Selected Works

“When Julie Sheehan takes the lyric poem out for a few drinks, everyone winds up talking fast and loose. The lush, agreeably-out-of-style cocktails who take the stage in Bar Book . . . [pull] the reader through this artful, wry, and unlikely book’s tales of hearts on the rocks and hearts surviving.” —Mark Doty

Nets woven of bird guides and self-help books, legal argot and street slang, Whitman's long-lined grass, and the sway, jangle, juxtaposition, joy, and far-flung syntax of the vast field of English—going back to its gnarly old roots in Chaucer—all populate Julie Sheehan's exuberant poems. Sheehan's poems are concerned with navigation and with choice; with how to live in an increasingly urbanized, global, technological world; with how to orient oneself as, for example, a woman in a still largely patriarchal society; and with how to make moral choices when the options seem either rich to embarassment or shamefully narrow. In Sheehan's world, hip-hop reverberates throughout Southern swamps and "men / have left their honeysuckle sows for yields / of telemarketing." Yet there are coyotes in Greenwich, Connecticut, where "our sinks back up, our toilets will not drain, / our nature disobediently tends toward nature." Orient Point seeks balance between the boundless joy and the tragic irony of today's existence, asking essentially, Do we make our way througn abundance or debris?

Julie Sheehan's Thaw is the second winner of the annual Poets Out Loud Prize for a book of poetry published each year by Fordham University Press in coordination with Fordham's Poets Out Loud program. The landscape of Thaw is America but the vast field of language is bravely Shakespearian. Sheehan's poems roil through catalpa, maurade through familial and domestic brakes, and, ultimately, brim to the top of the old earthen pot. Everywhere the poems remind that the endless—were we truly able to grasp it—would astonish. Each poem celebrates the ingredients, practice, and serving up of the fugitive mortal banquet, from pudding to bone.