A Blue House to Sleep In by Abby Templeton Greene

$19.99

 

The poems in Abby Templeton-Greene‘s A Blue House to Sleep in are full of bodies—of birth-blood and breastmilk, lip prints and broken wrists, grit and dirty fingernails—and capture the terror and joy, in all of their complexity, of what it means to be a mother, to love in the face of our own fragility. Though this is a deeply personal collection about motherhood and family, Templeton-Greene’s poems expand to include the larger, human family: the teenage refugee, the mother of George Floyd, mothers who live in other countries, speak with other tongues, mothers who cry and miscarry, mothers who lose sons and whose counters are sticky. When you enter Abby Templeton-Greene‘s Blue House, do so with your eyes open—these poems will come for you, “like the lions are at your back…like the hooves are in your stomach.”

–Lauren Marie Schmidt, Author of Filthy Labors

 

Oh these poems of motherhood and humanness—in which what is and what was and what might be crash into each other again and again. Abby Templeton-Greene brings us poems of the passing moment—fingerprints on the mirror, the baby howling at 4:23 a.m.—woven in with moments in which life and death hang bluely in the balance. These are love and loss poems that make me hold my breath, then deeply exhale as they invite an opening.

–Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, author of Hush and Naked for Tea

 

 

 

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Description

A Blue House to Sleep In

by Abby Templeton Greene

$19.99, Full-length, paper

979-8-88838-015-4

2022

Templeton Greene has crafted her third collection of poetry, A Blue House to Sleep In, embracing and questioning all things motherly: femme bodies, birth, bleeding, parenting, “the domestic”, dreams, nightmares, life and death– and gives all of these themes the value and import they deserve. This work challenges the dismissal of the domestic, the mother, the femme-ness as a whole. There is a counterbalance of poems around life and parenting, with poems of loss and death and suicide, highlighting the gravity of both and putting them on the scale together. Greene reveals many sides of mothering and motherhood: an imprisoned mother, a birth that never was, a mother’s confusion after the loss of her son, giving us a deeper connection to what links us as humans while keeping a pulse on the everyday.

Abby Templeton Greene is the author of three books of poetry: A Blue House to Sleep In, Prayer from a Magdalena Jail Cell and An Avocado Slowly Falling, a book of bilingual poems written in English and Spanish. Her work has been published in McSweeneys, Calyx Journal, RATTLE, Pilgrimage, The Wazee, The Mom Egg Review and other journals. She was the recipient of the 2012 Sixfold Writers contest prize for poetry, the 2011 Lighthouse Writers Seven Deadly Sins Writing Contest, and a finalist in the Blast Furnace Chapbook competition.

Abby lives in Denver, Colorado with her partner and two young children. She received her Bachelor’s Degree from Gettysburg College in Latin American Studies and Spanish and earned an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles. Abby is a fierce believer in the healing power of the arts. She has worked for the past 17 years teaching in public schools, enfusing the power of the creative into her classrooms. She is Amherst Writers and Artists certified and is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Sidewalk Poets, learn more here: abbytempletongreene.com

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