Unmentionables, by Beth Ann Fennelly

Just out from Norton–Unmentionables, a new poetry collection by Beth Ann Fennelly, the author of Open House, Tender Hooks, and Great With Child: Letters to a Young Mother. Poems with titles like “The Kudzu Chronicles” and “Bertha Morisot: Retrospective” live side-by-side here, giving testament to Fennelly’s range. The poems in this collection, which move seamlessly from the tongue-in-cheek to the erudite, are concerned in equal measure with the everyday and the lofty.

A taste, from Norton’s website. This excerpt is from the poem “First Warm Day in a College Town.”

Today is the day the first bare-chested
runners appear, coursing down College Hill
as I drive to campus to teach, hard
not to stare …