New Book; The House Began to Pitch: Poems by Kelly Whiddon

The House Began to Pitch: Poems by Kelly Whiddon was just released this month. I always have a hard time finding poetry collections with fairy tale retellings and Whiddon let me know about the collection herself. Wonderful! You can also see a list of Whiddon's published poems on her site. I don't have a table of contents for the book which I know you readers like to see.

Book description:

Winner of the 2011 Adrienne Bond Award for Poetry The House Began to Pitch is a collection of poems that begins by following the lives of a man and a woman who grow up in the rural South in the fifties and sixties. Many of the poems are told through the lens of fairy tales as a comment on archetypal constructs that make up our ideals of home and family. The tragedies that affect the young lives of these characters influence them as they marry and age and as the book moves into the third section, which takes a more general and contemporary approach to domestic struggles. The poems favor the imagistic and melodic, always with an attempt to make sense out of the conflict and chaos of our daily lives. The settings of a small town and farm in a South gone-by give a dramatic backdrop to the struggles of the characters and create an illuminating merger with fairy tales such as Cinderella, Winnie the Pooh, The Wizard of Oz, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. These narratives serve as a familiar reminder of the dreams we hold in childhood and how reality fractures those story molds, in both good ways and bad.

About the Author

Kelly Whiddon is a writer and professor from Macon, Georgia. She has published poetry in Crab Orchard Review, Poetry International, Meridian, Spoon River Poetry Review, and Southern Poetry Review, among others, as well as the recent anthology Writing on Napkins at the Sunshine Club.