The Beds

by Martha Rhodes

Overview

In The Beds, award-winning poet Martha Rhodes skillfully navigates a tonally complex terrain. Rhodes’ fourth collection mixes form and free-verse, specifically using the rondelet’s tight, obsessive repetition as a means to harness and modulate frenetic content.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932870534
Publisher:	Autumn House Press
Publication date:	01/01/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	56
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

MARTHA RHODES is the author of At the Gate, Perfect Disappearance (Green Rose Prize), and Mother Quiet. Her poems have been published in such journals as Agni, Columbia, Fence, New England Review, Pleiades, Ploughshares, and TriQuarterly and anthologized in Agni 30 Years, Extraordinary Tide: New Poetry by American Women, Poem in Your Pocket (a publication of the Academy of American Poets), and It's Not You, It's Me. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Martha Rhodes is the director of Four Way Books in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

Cate Marvin

I can assure you that Martha Rhodes' unflinching manner of address in The Beds will make you flinch...what's so brilliant about this book is how steadfastly it refuses closure. These poems, grim and wise, never arrive in the guise of the Good Girl. And for that brand of honesty, I am most grateful.

Editorial Reviews

Delivered with a disarming nonchalance, the poems of Rhodes’s fourth collection lock eyes with grief—at the dissolution of a marriage, the loss of a mind, the deaths of parents—and refuse to blink. “Easy to write hers. Loving Mother of Me,” says one poem’s speaker of the task of picking an inscription for her parents’ gravestones, “But for him—what? beyond his name/ and dates.” This kind of starkness, this quiet harshness, pushes poem after poem into a region somewhere far past conversation, but just before the place where there are no words. Caregiving is torture (“I brought to him the cups of tea/ he smashes across the room./ I brought to him the honey spoons/ he pasted on the wall”), while “Misery” (the title of one poem) is manifest everywhere because “I’ve died, or because you’ve broken/ your favorite wine glass, or lost your passport,/ or because you yourself are ill.” All of this pain is wound around a dark music, in which repetition must suffice for comfort, especially in a series of short, haunting nursery rhyme-like poems utilizing repeated lines: “I’m scared of frogs./ No Bermuda for me, nor ponds./ I’m scared of frogs./ They’re ugly. And creep up from bogs.” All beginnings in this book are merely preludes to endings, such as the new bed, “first purchase of my new life,” also the place “from which my soul may eventually, balloon-like, lift its string/ dangling from the ginkgo across the street while the rest/ of me is en route to my family’s welcoming plot in Sharon.” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

In The Beds, award-winning poet Martha Rhodes skillfully navigates a tonally complex terrain. Rhodes fourth collection mixes form and free-verse, specifically using the rondelet's tight, obsessive repetition as a means to harness and modulate frenetic content.”—goodreads

From the Publisher