Blooming Fiascoes is a collective of verse that deconstructs identity. We are beautiful and monstrous. We live in a beautiful and monstrous world. Ellen Hagan poetically mirrors these metaphoric adversaries, drawing on her experiences as a woman, an artist, a mother, a transplanted southerner, and above all, a human being. She plumbs origins in history, body, and living to question how we reckon our whole selves in the catacombs of a world gone mad:
We mourn, we bless, / we blow, we wail, we / wind--down, we sip, / we spin, we blind, we / bend, bow & hem. We / hip, we blend, we bind, / we shake, we shine, / shine. We lips & we / teeth, we praise & protest.
In these poems, Assyrian, Italian, and Irish lines seep deeper into a body that is growing older but remains engaged with unruly encounters: the experience of raising daughters, sexual freedom, and squaring body image against the body's prohibitions. This is a work where the legacy is still evolving and always asking questions in real time. Blooming Fiascos spindles poetry that is not afraid to see itself and the lives it inhabits.
About the Author: ELLEN HAGAN is the author of Hemisphere (TriQuarterly Books, 2015) and Crowned. A writer, performer, and educator, she is the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship in poetry and has received grants from the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance and the Kentucky Foundation for Women. Her poems and essays have been published in Creative Nonfiction and Poetry Northwest and in the anthologies She Walks in Beauty, Southern Sin, and Women of Resistance. Hagan is the director of the poetry and theater departments at the DreamYard Project and directs their International Poetry Exchange Program with Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines. She coleads the Alice Hoffman Young Writers Retreat at Adelphi University. She lives with her partner and children in New York City.
