Mammoth Life & Accident by Avra Wing

Avra Wing‘s poems have appeared in numerous journals including New Ohio Review, Image, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Santa Fe Review. She is the author of two novels: Angie, I Says, a New York Times “notable book” made into the film Angie, and After Isaac, for young adults. Avra leads a writing workshop at the Center for the Independence of the Disabled, New York. She can be found at www.avrawing.com and https://www.facebook.com/avra.wing.5

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PRAISE:

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Sorrow and humor, suffering and love––these seeming opposites are intimate partners in Avra Wing’s memorable poems. Wing’s gaze is direct and unsentimental, her voice as sharp and accurately aimed as a Yiddish epithet. Mammoth Life & Accident lays claim to our imagination with its news of life’s riskiness and the human bonds that make it worth living. This is a book of mature vision and rare honesty.

–Joan Larkin, author of Old Stranger

“As if she is hiking toward me / through a blizzard of time,” the speaker of this beautiful collection recalls, “I see her there”–– her mother in the 1940s, before the speaker is born. On the pages of Mammoth Life & Accident, time moves in palimpsest, and the keen, unfaltering voice of the speaker drops like a pin through layers of remembrance. With wry and wise attention, Avra Wing‘s poems conjure the past, chapters survived through grit and heart, all of it happened and happening, “this story made of snow” continually falling. Wing’s speaker never romanticizes those she’s lost. Instead, the dead step into the present with their full humanity– brittle, bruised and brimming with elegant imperfection, speaking with vital immediacy. Wing’s poems contemplate mortality and disability, childhood, marriage and motherhood, travel and home. These poems are ekphrastic and elegaic, “a chorus of praise,” full of tender reflection and bright, biting humor. This collection teaches me what a poet can do– wield and bend time, build a vibrant archive, and step into the slipstream of memory, “as if / they will stay in motion forever.”

–Monica Gomery, author of Might Kindred