Named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books Of 2015
Adirondack Center for Writing Poetry Award Co-Winner, 2015
Selected by Michael Klein for the Hilary Tham Capital Collection, The Word Works, 2014
Immortal Medusa
Ungar’s fourth book transforms suffering to wonder, and these poems insist on grace in many forms: family that lasts, love that is honest even before it is kind, and words that carry meaning forward into a future where history, nature, and art still thrive. Poems celebrate the educated and edgy with heroes from Emily Dickinson to Vermeer, Lady Gaga to the noble porcupine. “Reading these poems, we are seized by the worlds she reveals. It is the feeling we call ravishment.” —Gregory Pardlo.
“Ungar’s new collection may not make her immortal, but it surely establishes her as a contemporary poet of the first rank. …This poetry collection is like a bowl of fruit and cream: it’s so delicious, and it all goes down so easily, that you forget how much nutrition is there… An entrancing book of poetry.” —Starred Kirkus Review
Order from
Praise
“A strange and exciting book that takes in so much about the physical world and sends up a flare now and then from somewhere spiritual and more mysterious. What I admired most about these poems was how their meanings so influenced their form on the page, so that by the end, I realized—the way it is with any collection of value—that this is a book about how to see.”—Michael Klein
“Like any great seeker, Ungar pursues the truth beneath surfaces available to the naked eye. Reading these poems, we are seized by the worlds she reveals. It is the feeling we call ravishment.” —Gregory Pardlo
POEMS
Video – “Kabbalah Barbie”
Red Dragon Reading Series, SUNY Oneonta
“Dead Letters”
Rattle
“A Young Person’s Guide to Philosophy”
Literal Latte, Second Prize Winner
“My Father Looks at Vermeer for the Last Time”
“Blue Whale”
“Why I’d Rather Be a Seahorse”
Poets and Artists Magazine
“Kabbalah Barbie”
“Blue Whale”
“VA”
“Sarah”
“Does Anyone Know a Spell to Turn into a Meremayd that Really Works”
Atticus Review
“Becoming my Father’s Mother”
“Ode to a Porcupine”
“Sans Everything,”
“My Father Looks at Vermeer for the Last Time”
Kin
“I Am Accused of Not Killing Woodchucks”
Misfit Magazine
“Hortus Conclusus”
The Laundry Line Divine
Prose
“Distracted Notes on Being a Single, Geriatric-Mother Poet”
Rattle
Reviews
Starred Kirkus Review
Poets and Artists Magazine
Straightforward Poetry