Beloved Idea

By Ann Killough

Subjects: American poetry, 21st century poetry, Poetry, Women authors, American women authors, Poetry (poetic works by one author)

Description: “This brave and remarkable debut functions as one long poem and achieves extension through Stein-like repetition, and meaning through accretion and excess. In seeking a metaphorical ideal, Killough’s struggle to write is a struggle to understand her feelings for her nation—a process akin to a mother learning that her child is a murderer, a truth from which there can be no refuge or respite. “Killough is a poet who is not afraid to be ‘too big.’ Her world cannot be contained within narrow margins; her sentences sprawl across the lines and pages like our own messy beloved geographies, the country we call home.” —<em>Library Journal</em> “[Beloved Idea] is an interesting trip through the minefield of metaphor. Each one you step on has the possibility of exploding.” —<em>The Great American Pin-Up</em> “Disentangling the complicated intersections of faith and American identity drive the progression of the twenty-three poems that make up <em>Beloved Idea</em>… The poems skirt on the edge of the breakdown of language as the metaphor takes on a variety of guises: sheep’s clothing, Melville’s white whale, an astronaut, the Mississippi River… <em>Beloved Idea</em> uses the idea of the metaphor to create pluralities of meaning within one word or symbol.” —<em>ForeWord Magazine</em> “Astonishingly original and disturbingly urgent, Beloved Idea foregrounds metaphor as a means of exploring the nation in which we live. Using the sentence as a flexible prosodic unit, Ann Killough creates a sequence that offers linguistic delights and sly humor even as it forces us to confront the most difficult questions about our history, literature, politics, and culture.” —Martha Collins “Ann Killough’s voice is self-aware, skeptical, and inconsolable. With bracketed lower case titles and long strophic lines, with fragmented echoes of the white whale and the open road, and with proliferating metaphors that question the worth and nature of metaphor itself, Killough probes the soul of 21st century America and gives our own quiet desperation a name and vivid shape.” —Fred Marchant “<em>Beloved Idea</em> investigates our world with passionately reasoned nearly desperate attention. Acknowledging the present we find ourselves questioning, Ann Killough braves multiple acts of metaphorical consequence. Reading this book awakens one’s desire to understand why we’re here and what we’re capable of thinking. It invites one’s mind to awaken. It is therefore a very, very good book.” —Dara Wier