Architect by Alison Thumel

Architect by Alison Thumel

When he died, my brother became the architect of the rest of my life, writes Alison Thumel in Architect, which interweaves poems, lyric essays, and visual art to great emotional effect.

“Somewhere between elegy and love letter, Alison Thumel’s Architect creates a living language that could not feel more vitalWith Frank Lloyd Wright serving as her Virgil, Thumel builds an animate structure that manages to ‘memorialize someone unequivocally, without footnotes.’ I can’t think of a collection that draws a better blueprint for intimacy and for restoration, particularly now when we need space for both.”—A. Van Jordan, author of When I Waked, I Cried to Dream Again

“’Inside a memory / is its ruin.’ So begins Thumel’s exquisitely crafted debut in which the poet fabricates an architecture for grief. In these spaces, metaphor is the only language for loss. ‘If this were myth I would already be transformed.’ This is the calling of poetry, to glean meaning from the ineffable no matter how shattering the results. Architect devastates even as it shines.”—Quan Barry, author of Auction

“Thumel has conjured up a structure like none other. A little miracle house made of words that, once seen, can never be forgotten, and once felt, never unfelt. With an almost otherworldly fearlessness, she shows us the shape loss leaves in a life and the words and forms that so beautifully and inadequately fill it.” —Jackson Holbert, author of Winter Stranger

Alison Thumel’s poems have appeared in Poetry, the Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship in poetry at Stanford University, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she completed her MFA.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781682262481
ISBN 10	1682262480
Title	Architect
Author	Alison Thumel
Series	Miller Williams Poetry Prize
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Arkansas Press
Year published	2024-03-31
Number of pages	74
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.