Save Our Ship
Barbara Ungar’s fifth full-length poetry collection, Save Our Ship, was selected by Mark Jarman for the Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, arriving from Ashland Poetry Press in November 2019. This collection was inspired by “The Diverse Vices of Women, Alphabetized,” a renaissance alphabet intended to teach women to avoid sensual pleasure, particularly that of speech. In these diverse poems, alphabetized, #MeToo meets Global Weirding, and women do not mind their tongues, or their Ps and Qs.
“Both laughter and tears can catch you by surprise in Barbara Ungar’s Save Our Ship. As you live with these witty, satiric, and at times wrenching poems, you will find that their humor darkens while their sadness grows strangely lighter…. There is an unsettling retrospective vision of what we have come to, a realization that Cassandra still walks among us telling her truth, being heard and yet being ignored. You will not be able to ignore Ungar’s wonderful poems. They are memorable. They make us think again about our lives and the brave, complicated humor that may somehow redeem us.” —Mark Jarman
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Awards
Richard Snyder Memorial Prize, Ashland Poetry Press 2018
Named to Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2019
Ben Franklin Award, Independent Book Publishers Association 2020
Distinguished Favorite, Independent Press Award 2020
Praise
“A collection of 57 poems that sound alarms about current ecological, political, and cultural trends…. A distress call that’s worth reading and heeding.” —Starred Kirkus Review
“Impending apocalypses of various kinds—personal, cultural, and environmental—thread through Barbara Ungar’s new poetry collection, Save Our Ship. The etymological root of “apocalypse” means to uncover or reveal, and this collection underscores that at the heart of all apocalypses is both a heartbreaking sense of loss and an unlikely hope for the future.” —Vivian Wagner, Pedestal Magazine
“If we’re going down well, there is no better way to enjoy our last sentient days than, Save Our Ship.” —Alan Catlin, Misfit Magazine
“By turns melancholic and defiant, witty, wistful and compassionate, ‘Save Our Ship’ has that combination of seriousness and playfulness (serious playfulness and playful seriousness), which has been such a defining feature of much of the best American English-language poetry that runs in the same vein as that pursued by— amongst others— Elizabeth Bishop and Frank O’Hara. It’s a collection that’s well worth tracking down and one which continues to engage— and surprise— with every reading.” —Tom Phillips, Inkroci
Poems
“Your Mother Serves Tongue”
Verse Daily
“Après Moi”
“Ars Poetica”
“Venus With a Mirror”
Inkroci – English
Inkroki – Italian
“Save Our Ship”
The Nervous Breakdown
“Cassandra”
Scoundrel Time
“Dear Bill”
“Wedding with First Boyfriend”
“Interior Paramour”
“MOAB”
“After Zumba”
Atticus Review
“The Blues Sister”
“X-Wife” (as Whose Truck is Parked in Your Drive)
Misfit Magazine
“Endnotes to Coral Reefs”
Diaphanous
“Emily Dickinson’s Estate Sale”
“Painlandia”
“How the Light Gets In”
“She Drives Home After Viewing the Drones Quilt”
Arabesques
“Venus with a Mirror”
Poets and Painters
“The Woman with a Live Cockroach in her Skull”
Chronogram
“Quoth the Queane”
Green Briar Review
“Now We Are 15”
La Presa
“Rondeau for Shaimaa al-Sabbagh”
Wordpeace
“Jeanne et Moi (or, Two Degrees)”
“Hand Me Down”
“Souvenir”
Misfit Magazine
“Ars Poetica”
“How It Happens”
Trailer Park Quarterly
Reviews
Inkroci – English
Inkroci – Italian
Pedestal Magazine
Misfit Magazine
Kirkus Review
Trailer Park Review
Mom Egg Review
Adirondack Daily Express