Updated October 4, 2009: Winner of the Thorpe Menn Annual Literary Excellence Award, co-sponsored by the American Association of University Women and the Kansas City Public Library.
What’s Right About What’s Wrong, a collection of poems, was published by Helicon Nine Editions in August 2008 (ISBN 978-1-884235-40-5). The book is in (and sometimes out of) stock at online stores, but you can also purchase a copy by sending a check for $9.95 to Helicon Nine Editions, PO Box 22412, Kansas City, MO 64113. Or call 816-753-1095. Or email helicon9 at aol dot com. If you’d like a signed copy, please email the author directly at donnatrussell at gmail dot com.
Reviewers: For a comp, email publisher Gloria Vando Hickok at vandog at ca.rr dot com. (And she and I will thank you for your interest.)
SLATE review by Melinda Henneberger (Best Books of 2008) in slate.com.
KANSAS CITY STAR review by Kathleen Johnson in The Kansas City Star.
What’s Right About What’s Wrong was included on The Kansas City Star‘s noteworthy books of 2008.
ALSOP review by Jane Levin in Alsop Review.
≈ ≈ ≈
Each one is a compact little rock of Texas Gothic, thrown hard. Think Flannery O’Connor in verse, with less God and more rodeo.
Every poem in this collection is a five star, worthy of the explicator’s science and the sensitive reader’s tears. Her poems of grief unavoidable, sustained, or in progress, join those of Emily Dickinson in their strength and assured longevity.
Donna Trussell’s poems are lean, and brilliant. They swerve and startle, the way life does, but somehow better. What’s Right About What’s Wrong — you’ll turn down corners of pages, copy poems for friends, come back and back again to images so potent and penetrating they feel almost eerie in their stunning beauty.
If Donna Trussell speaks to us “from the fragile net of the living,” she is spoken to by ghosts still animated by “the look of longing.” That’s what’s right about what’s wrong, that equation – life the dividend, death the divisor – “that solves,” Trussell tells us in the title poem, “to an infinite fraction / that can’t be right, / but is.
These poems, passionate and sometimes angry, sting. And though succinct, they grow large in the silences they force us to listen to.
Wonderful. Reads like a 10th book, not a first book. There’s authority and boldness to the poems — assured, confident, no gimmicks. They’re so tight, like little fists.
What’s Right About What’s Wrong cover photo is Namibia Sand House Plate NH17 by Richard Ehrlich.
This page has the following sub pages.
Hey, let me know when I can order this book from the Raven.
Congratulations!
And this is an amazing cite of yours!
xoxoxoh
Fantastic…and congratulations again! Not only cancer/writing, but my mother was a Texan. Lubbock. Texas Tech. Hmmmmm.
[...] of the members of the WUP chapter of the lady bloggers union are also authors ourselves (see “What’s Right about Wrong Poems,” “If They Only Listened to Us,” “Shelf Discovery,” [...]
[...] of the members of the WUP chapter of the lady bloggers union are also authors ourselves (see “What’s Right about Wrong Poems,” “If They Only Listened to Us,” “Shelf Discovery,” [...]