The House of Entertaining Science – SAVE 50%!

In this collection, Lynne McMahon offers poems of memory and youth, “all lycra and spandex”; of literary influences, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Anna Akhmatova (from whom the book’s title is derived); and of adulthood and the ambiguities of family life. As in her previous volume, Devolutions of the Nude, these poems are “richly allusive and diverse” (Indiana Review). But they also show a rare groundedness and coherence—a yearning, in the words of Eavan Boland, “to heal the false divisions between the public and the private, between the outer meaning and the inner perception.”

Lynne McMahon is an American poet. She graduated from University of Utah with a PhD in 1982. She teaches at University of Missouri, Her work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, New Virginia Review, American Poetry Review, The Southern Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The Nation, Partisan Review, Poetry, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, The Yale Review, The New England Review and The Paris Review.