A Modern Herbal
Out of the rich ground of an exuberant and irresistible imagination, Amy Glynn has produced an adult’s garden of verses, a book blooming with exceptional beauty, formal poise, passion, sass, wit, and what another age would call wisdom of the heart. A Modern Herbal is a stunning virtuoso performance, one of the best first books I’ve seen in a very long time.
— Alan Shapiro
The poems of Glynn’s A Modern Herbal burst at the seams with a sensuousness whose voluptuary pleasures compel their deeply cultivated insights. Deliciously intimate, smartly seductive, Greacen’s speakers explore the manifold tensions between decadence and decay, ecstasy and surrender, the mythological narrative and the personally reconciled lyric. Lush, provocative, mischievously intelligent—this is a book with serious voltage.
— Katherine Larson
Amy Glynn’s high-energy herbarium glides through discourses botanical and mathematical, swerving elegantly from casual to erudite, lyrical to essayistic; here there’s barely a border between the gorgeous speech of praise and the take-no-guff attitude of the undeceived. The poems of A Modern Herbal are spoken to plants and the beloved, to the self, the reader, so that the garden becomes — as it always is — as it always is — a site of contention, an education, and a meeting place for the cultivated and the wild, both stinging nettles and traveler’s joy.
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Amy Glynn is an award-winning poet and essayist whose work appears widely in journals and anthologies including The Best American Poetry. Her first poetry collection, A Modern Herbal, was published in 2013 by Measure Press; her second, Romance Language, is forthcoming in early 2020. She has received the Carolyn Kizer Award from Poetry Northwest, the SPUR Award of the Association of Western Writers, two James Merrill House fellowships, and scholarships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences. She currently serves as Poet Laureate for the cities of Lafayette and Orinda, CA.