For Today: Poems - Paperback

by Carolyn Hembree (Author), Ava Leavell Haymon (Editor)

A revelatory collection of poems set in the Gulf South, Carolyn Hembree's For Today chronicles the experience of a woman who becomes a mother shortly after her father's death and struggles to raise her child amid private and public turmoil. Written in closed and nonce forms that give way to the field composition of the maximalist title poem, the work explores grief, rage, and love in a community vulnerable to Anthropocene climate disasters. Through relationships with her daughter, neighbors, friends, ancestors, other poets (living and dead), and the earth, the speaker is freed to accept and celebrate her own perishability.

Author Biography

Carolyn Hembree is the author of Skinny and Rigging a Chevy into a Time Machine and Other Ways to Escape a Plague. She is associate professor at the University of New Orleans and serves as poetry editor of Bayou Magazine.