ABOUT THIS BOOK

Traversing time, cities, and voices, The Apollonia Poems finds its central aesthetic in place: physical and locational, perceptual and imagined. Judith Vollmer's poet-wanderer explores the layered terrains of urban environments from Pittsburgh to the Mediterranean to the Carpathians. Employing narratives and lyrics, songs and reports, and a short verse-play in three voices, Vollmer's meditations are by turns elegiac and celebratory, colloquial and lyrical.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Judith Vollmer is the author of the award-winning poetry collections Level Green, The Door Open to the Fire, Black Butterfly, Reactor, and The Water Books. She teaches in the MFA Program in Poetry & Poetry in Translation at Drew University and has been an artist in residence at Yaddo and a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome. She lives in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

REVIEWS

"This book is a trip, or many trips. Here is the creative mind at work and play—its geological layers uncovered, lifetimes and cultures revisited, offered to us in Judith Vollmer's characteristic voice: curious, tender, and flinty, with its own grave and ethereal music." —Alicia Ostriker

"Judith Vollmer's dwelling-in-traveling poems follow the 'salt-sweet restless soul' into labyrinths of mirrors, walls, shrouds, veils, membranes, through portals sussurant with transatlantic chants, through a palimpsest of echoes caught in the undersong of women suffering over the quickness of life." —Mihaela Moscaliuc

TABLE OF CONTENTS

I.
Another Green
Window with Bottles
Walking to Miami
Children of October
The Great Lakes
White BoxBlue Lid
I Don’t Want to Wake Her
Two Women
In an Old Hotel
The Transfer
12th Ward
The Vowel
Apollonia Is Restored to the Book

II. The Apollonia Sequence
Mała Babka Pays an Evening Visit, Rolls Down Her Stockings and Looks Around
Before the Face of Matki Bożej Czestochowa
Very SmartVery Proud
Old Polish Songs
She Pours Wisniak into Their Coffee Cups
Mother Comes
Why Are You Wearing Your Father’s Sweater?
Did You Place Wishes in the Four Walls?
She Pours Boric Acid & Water into the Eye Cup

III.
Crystal Bar
Sentences from My Father, 1967–1970
Dear Sky Travelers

IV.
Little Death
Last Effects, Old House
Mother Wall
Street Grate
The Shape-up
After Reading Another Book of Dull Poetry, I Go Out and Cut the Grass
Flower Meal
My Mother’s Paintings
Copper, Gold, Olives, Wine
In Praise of Margaret Drabble
The Looting of Cerveteri

Notes