The Serious World
The Serious World is a collection of epistolary poems written to Sylvia Plath about depression, therapy, friendship, family, and the struggling life of an artist.With humor, sensitivity, and deep reflection, Laura Read explores many themes including mental health, suicide, loss, feminism, motherhood, and aging, offering a fresh view of the world as seen through the feminist poet’s searching spyglass.
Reaching back into history to talk with Plath and other historical figures who have suffered and wrote about their suffering, Read tries to make sense of what it’s like to be alive and suffering now. These deeply felt poems include language from Plath’s The Bell Jarand poems about Marguerite Duras and Simone de Beauvoir, along with other strange bedfellows from pop culture who make appearances, among them Kenny Rogers, Dr. Seuss, Kurt Cobain, and Courtney Love.
But She Is Also Jane
Conversational, irreverent, and disarmingly honest, the poems of But She Is Also Jane follow the everyday contours of women’s lives and the expectations they grapple with. As our speaker approaches middle age, she copes with the loss of loved ones, the realities of an emptying nest, the routine indignities of sexism, and nostalgia for the past. Laura Read’s third poetry collection balances discussions of Degas, Vermeer, and Marie Curie with reflections on Sammy Hagar, a troubling outing to a male revue, and memories of watching Mork and Mindy on the night of her mother’s hysterectomy.
“Read the first half dozen pages of But She Is Also Jane and you’ll know there’s no stopping: the wit, poignancy, and unguardedness are astonishing—and never wane. Canny observations, instantly engaging questions (‘Is everything good also bad?’) and invaluable detours abound. And Laura Read’s syntax has a distinctive simplicity even when the emotional territory is complex. Hilarious and wise, this work is brilliantly constructed and deeply satisfying.”
—Ellen Doré Watson, author of pray me stay eager
Dresses from the Old Country
In Laura Read’s second poetry collection, the former poet laureate of Spokane, WA, weaves past and present together to create a portrait of a life in progress. As the speaker looks back on her life, she exists simultaneously as all the selves she has ever been: a lost child, a lonely adolescent, a teacher, a daughter, a friend, a wife, a mother—a woman continually shaped and reshaped by memory and experience. Deeply rooted in a particular time and place, Read’s poems strip away the illusion of the passage of time as they reveal how we are all wearing “dresses from the old country.”
Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral
Winner of the 2011 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
“Instructions for My Mother’s Funeral uncovers the mysteries of girlhood in haunting tableaus and synesthesiac encounters with the past and then gradually moves us into the domestic present. The death of a father and remarriage of a mother, a complicated relationship with a brother, seen through a child’s eyes; a house stoppered like a bottle where she sits alone in the quiet aftermath. Strange in that way all art is strange, light come to light, but always a palpable darkness riding beneath; a mature lyrical voice translating memory’s turbulent, wordless world.”
— Dorianne Laux
The Chewbacca on Hollywood Boulevard Reminds Me of You
Winner of the 2010 Floating Bridge Press Chapbook Award
This chapbook is currently out of print, but you can download and read a digital copy of it here: