On Amanda Newell’s Poetry
“Amanda Newell’s Postmortem Say is a collection of urgent and truthful self-revelations about marriage, motherhood, the life cycle of a love affair, all written within the maelstrom of our modern American violence. Blood is everywhere: the blood of birth, death, desire. Newell’s language throughout is precise, viscerally arresting, yet always in touch with the pulse and breath of the vernacular. The poems whisper in the reader’s ear of pain while providing the consolations of insight and compassion. For all the wounds suffered and remembered in Postmortem Say, this is a book that heals.”
~ Dan O'Brien, author of Our Cancers and Survivor's Notebook
“Love and death, poetry’s immortal themes, are interwoven throughout Amanda Newell’s Postmortem Say. Death is everywhere—in the fields and forests, on darkened roads, in the delivery room—but there is also love, the kind that defies convention and outlasts death itself. These poems confront, without flinching, hard truths about what it means to be a woman, a mother, a wife, and a lover. Like “the clink of brass bullets as they spill from your pockets in the spin cycle,” there are images here that continue to resonate long after the page has been turned.”
~Sue Ellen Thompson, Winner of the Maryland Author Award and author of Sea Nettles: New & Selected Poems
“Music has to make itself distinct from noise, and poetry has to take back language from the clutches of the internet, the W9 form, the committee, and the TV. It is this taking back of language that is at the heart of Amanda Newell’s powerful and brave poem.”
~Lynn Emanuel, on selecting “A Woman From the Infant Mortality Review Board Calls” as the winner of Carlow University’s Patricia Dobler Poetry Award.
Click on image to listen to Amanda Newell in conversation with Tim Green, Rattle’s editor.