In her collection "Incarnate Grace," poet Moira Linehan explores, questions, and ultimately celebrates her attempt to live in the temple of the present.

After learning she has breast can cer, the poet struggles to live an exam ined life. Alienated and estranged from her own body, she turns her cancer into "these binoculars, / this new way of looking," and uses it as a way of fix ing herself firmly within the moment. As she travels Ireland and the Pacific Northwest, her busy mind moves from the knot in her breast to the knots in her knitting to the illuminated knots of The Book of Kells to the tossing, knotted surface of the sea; from the margins of her surgery-clean but not ideal-to the margins of illuminated manuscripts. She links the mundane to the mythic, intertwining connections between scripture and nature, storms and loss, winter and light, breast cancer and em broidery. As she returns to her home on a small pond in Massachusetts, she takes with her the fruits of her travels: incarnate grace of the ordinary.

Vivid and compelling, Incarnate Grace finds beauty in the worst of cir cumstances and redemption in the fab ric of daily life

About the Author
Moira Linehan is the author of If No Moon, winner of the 2006 Crab Or chard Series in Poetry Open Competition and an Honor Book in Poetry in the 2008 Massachusetts Book Awards. Her poetry has appeared in America, Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, Notre Dame Review, Poetry East, Quiddity, Salaman der, Southwest Review, Image, Prairie Schooner, and many others.


Book Information
ISBN 9780809333899
Author Moira Linehan
Format Paperback
Page Count 80
Imprint Southern Illinois University Press
Publisher Southern Illinois University Press
Weight(grams) 165g
Dimensions(mm) 223mm * 164mm * 5mm