home
books
movies
recordings
essays

calendar
biography
awards
articles

features
road trips
store
gallery

academic center
press center
links
contact
news

Summer 2005 selection for Poetry Talk discussion group

Tender Hooks by Beth Ann Fennelly

Publication Details Paperback: 128 pages; Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; ISBN: 0393326853; Published: May 1, 2005. Hardcover available, published by W. W. Norton & Company in April 2004.

"I wrote Tender Hooks because I wanted to figure out what I was experiencing. I wrote not to provide answers but to understand the questions. . . . When I was a child I misheard the word 'tenterhooks.' And this title I have chosen has proved apt." —Beth Ann Fennelly

Introduction by Sherman Alexie

One of the things I most hate about poetry criticism is the supposed difference between women’s and men’s literature. Women’s poetry is often accused of being overly domestic, as if writing about family is a minor pursuit.

Fennelly’s Tender Hooks is filled with epics about marriage, parenthood, and family. It’s funny, sexy, and always surprising. What it comes down to is this – this book made me realize that a great poem about breast feeding, about the smallest details of the process, is truly more universal, humane, and epic than another boring war poem. All that blah, blah, blah aside, Fennely is just damn good, always accessible, and smart.

Reviews
The pun of the collection's title probes a predominating theme: the messy, sometimes angry and frequently euphoric terrain of new motherhood. The first poem, "Bite Me," displays Fennelly's characteristic earthy brashness: "finally I burst at the seams/ and you were out/ Look, Ha, you didn't kill me after all/ Monster I have you." Like Plath minus the lyricism or Sharon Olds minus the sweet aftertaste, Fennelly doesn't flinch from showing the darker side of mothering, not just the can't-see-straight exhaustion and the anxiety of new parenthood, but the fury of both infant and mother: "No one ever mentioned she's out for blood. I wince/ as she tugs milk from ducts all the way to my armpits." The wrath is marched in equal doses by evidence of primal, physical love: "I whispered in her see-through ear/ I'd keep her safe forever-/ I, her first lover." The two middle sections of the collection include poems of place, parents, love, followed by a long, meandering poem that juxtaposes the Bible, miscarriage, teaching writing and the new baby. The book's last section returns to the (stronger) material of parenting and ends on an intentionally mixed note: responding to a commonsensical voice that says infancy, like the pangs of childhood, eventually fade into memory, Fennelly's speaker declares, "Fine, I say, not meaning it. I'll have another." —Publishers Weekly


"I love this book. If handling is everything, and it is, Beth Ann Fennelly shows that there isn't a subject—no matter how ordinary or domestic—that can't be vitalized by an interesting mind. Page after page, she give us the elan of found language, behind which is a contrarian's passion for finding the true by working against the predictable." —Stephen Dunn


Move over, Sharon Olds, and make way, Denise Duhamel! Fennelly is a southern poet who writes of her own female experience as carnally, or, perhaps, incarnationally, as either of those northerners. If she is not as harrowing as Olds, whose reports of interfamilial violence can be hair-raising, or as hilarious as Duhamel, who seems frequently to have no shame, she is hardly reticent. Formally, she favors single poems and sequences longer than two pages, she seldom rhymes or constructs metered stanzas, her sense of where to break a line is as good as the late Denise Levertov's, she writes striking epigrams (e.g., "First Day at Daycare": "My daughter comes home smelling like / another woman's perfume"), and she often proceeds directly from the title into the body of a poem, as if the title were the first line. She writes primarily about the birth and infancy-to-toddlerhood of her daughter, secondarily about the loss of a previous daughter to miscarriage. She puts the physical realities of the mother-child bond--the touches, smells, sounds, and phenomena--into her poems with an ease that overrides queasiness (still, many men may blanch at her frank detail), relaying the experience of motherhood, including the emotional pain of miscarriage, more convincingly and intimately than any other poet who comes to mind. This is awesome, humanely humbling poetry. Ray Olson —Booklist


"With amazing panache, verve, and humor, Beth Ann Fennelly writes frankly and tenderly about young marriage and new motherhood. This accomplished and powerful book makes clear that she is one of the most talented and exciting poets of her generation." —Michael Collier


Fennelly's second book follows close upon her first, Open House, a well-received winner of the 2001 Kenyon Review Prize. In this equally engaging new collection, Fennelly is caught up with the birth of a daughter and maps her obsession: the intense baby worship, the engorged breasts, the failed attempts to move on to another topic. Finally breaking free, she forges ahead to poems about life in the Midwest (she's from Illinois) and in Mississippi, where she has been teaching; other topics include her husband, her friends, and moving. Then she's back to little Claire and the grief of an earlier miscarriage. Fennelly counters academic pretension with American spunk: "Oh, I have been to the temples of Kyoto,/ I have stood on the Pont Neuf, and my eyes, they drank it in, but my taste buds/ shuffled along in the beer line at Wrigley Field./ It was the day they gave out foam fingers." The inability to stay still permeates these poems. Fennelly observes that her name sounds like "methamphetamine"; in "Moving," she refuses to retrace her steps, even to fix a faulty sentence: "Scheming to get our security deposit back, nail holes/ are spackled with toothpaste. Oops, our modifiers/ dangle." A smart and vivacious book. —Library Journal


"From some of what we might think of as the most overused of poetic occasions—the I'm-a-new-mother poem, the I'm-a-poet-writing-a-poem—Beth Ann Fennelly shows how, owing to her own deep smarts, high spirits, and dead-on kick-ass language, a lively and essential magic can still be pulled out of the old top hat." —Albert Goldbarth


"Beth Ann Fennelly takes the great risk of being clear, of handing her reader a set of coordinates. But she also knows just how to nudge her poems into those mysterious realms where only poetry can go." —Billy Collins

Other sources

Norton Poets Online includes some poems from the book

NEA Web site includes poem, bio and statement from Fennelly

Another poem on Poets in their Thirties Web site

An interview on Poetry Daily, includes a poem

Ploughshares Web site has bio and links

Where to find it? Suggestions -

• Amazon.com has both new & used copies
• Alibris.com has used copies for sale
• Look for it online at your local bookstore
• Your local library may also have copies

Join in the discussion Please visit Yahoo! Groups to sign up and to participate in Poetry Talk: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FallsApart_PoetryTalk

back to poetry club

back to features