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Poetry | $13 ($11 direct from UDP)
Perfect-bound. 72 pp, 5 x 7 in.
ISBN 978-1-933254-85-2
Publication Date: February 14, 2011
Distribution: SPD
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Book Trailer (YouTube)
In Applies to Oranges, Maureen Thorson’s debut full-length collection of poems, oranges, spiders, tourists, and a Zenith television conspire to turn the conventions of narrative on its side. These poems fracture and refract narrative by crafting a story from seemingly absurd symbols whose recursive use defies coherence, but expand the imagination by gradually revealing an anachronistic, nostalgic, and cinematic world. The precision of these poems transforms a simple escapist fantasy into an internalized landscape that reveals both humor and sadness with successive repetition.
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Praise for Applies to Oranges
“Thorson is an orphaned Victorian trapped in a robot spider who wants badly to sell us madeleines woven of fake hypnotic oranges, but all time has converged in these lines, the astronavigation is cluttered with satellites, her suicidal flower arrangements can't be decoded, the 'signal / fail[s], decay[s] into ornament,' and real grief of lost love and the motion picture clips of it we project onto foreign scenery make us realize that 'the radio plays / different stations, and you have no radio.' The commerce of fictional, degenerating visual language and memory confuses us and comforts us as we—as Thorson—wrestle with its insidious, satisfying infestation of our individual and collective experience. This is wonderful, deeply, and superficially felt work.” —Cathy Eisenhower
“Maureen Thorson's first full-length book is a necessary satellite signal made of a uniquely singular ache and echo. She deftly performs a precise dissection of heartbreak's timeless ability to blow open the universe of our lives and allow our fascinating agonies to burst into being. Applies to Oranges is a collection that is, at once, a mythic tale of loss and a microscopic look into the delicate beauty of broken things. These wonderful poems demand that you linger in their haunting world, and as Thorson says, 'breathe slowly, if at all.'” —Ada Limon
"Maureen Thorson's narrator addresses a former love (who may as well be us) in a series of beautiful sonnetlike pieces that cohere in a sequence like shards in a mosaic—some bits darker, some brighter, each tight. “I want to diagram the light that shines out through the holes you pricked in me,” she says. “Instead, I retract into extravagant gestures, diaries, bonfires, the psycho gloss of wilted blossoms, dead-eyed stamens stitched in rows.” Thorson’s Applies to Oranges sings and surprises in both new and timeless ways, as love’s decay blooms gorgeously and is borne away by dissipating spiders." —Shanna Compton
"There are many ways to achieve beauty, and Maureen Thorson's is one of the most direct."
—dbqp: visualizing poetics
“Thorson's first full-length combines the nuanced clarity of the traditional sonnet sequence with the programmatic experiment for which Ugly Duckling has become known.”
–Publisher’s Weekly
"In this collection of fifty-nine untitled prose poems, nothing is wasted; indeed, it is the remains, what’s left over after the fruits of joy have been consumed or lost, that gives the work its vision."
—BOMBLOG
"Applies to Oranges accomplishes what the best lyric poetry sets out to do: it resists the temptations of resolution and closure. Instead it frees language to sing about the only sure thing, which is the heartache of our world’s impermanence"
—NewPages
NEWS AND REVIEWS
07.31.12 | Maureen Thorson interviewed at Jacket2
07.31.12 | Applies to Oranges reviewed at Jacket2
03.09.12 | Maureen Thorson’s Applies to Oranges is reviewed at The Volta
03.05.12 | Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson is reviewed at The Rumpus
02.02.12 | One Sleeps the Other Doesn’t and Applies to Oranges chosen as year’s best by Coldfront
01.25.12 | Maureen Thorson’s Applies to Oranges mentioned on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog
01.21.12 | Maureen Thorson’s Applies to Oranges reviewed at Impose Magazine
06.24.11 | Contest on HTMLGIANT to win a copy of Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson
05.16.11 | Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson reviewed in Publishers Weekly
05.11.11 | Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson is reviewed on the BOMBLOG
05.02.11 | Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson is reviewed in NewPages
03.19.11 | Applies to Oranges by Maureen Thorson is reviewed on the dbqp: visualizing poetics blog
03.07.11 | Maureen Thorson, author of Applies to Oranges, interviewed in Bookslut
LINKS
Maureen Thorson is a poet, publisher, and book designer living in Washington, D.C. She is the author of a number of chapbooks, including Twenty Questions for the Drunken Sailor (2009), Mayport (2006), which won the Poetry Society of America's National Chapbook Fellowship, and Novelty Act (Ugly Duckling Presse 2004). Her poems can be found in many anthologies and journals, including the forthcoming Yale Anthology of Younger American Poets, Exquisite Corpse, Hotel Amerika, LIT, The Hat, and 6×6. Maureen is the publisher and editor of Big Game Books, a small press dedicated to emerging poets. She is also the co-curator of the In Your Ear reading series at the DC Arts Center and the founder of NaPoWriMo, an annual project in which poets attempt to write a poem a day for the month of April.
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