About the Book
In this sixth collection from a beloved American poet, the reader is asked to reflect on the stranger within others--and ourselves. The speaker in Old Stranger: Poems begs to be seen and known, even when faced with her aging and her own mortality. Even as we age, there's a looming space for the mysterious stranger we embody without realizing it. Do we ever truly know who we are?
In the book, familiarity takes so many forms, as does the stranger: sometimes the stranger is a loved one, sometimes it is the speaker to themselves, and other times it's one who might seem like a stranger in the poem but turns out to be recognizable in one or more ways.
We are looking back, but at the same time we are so much in the present, there's an in-betweenness of the temporal that is so dreamlike and delicious. The poems are suspended and feel weightless even as their subjects are weighty and, at times, dark.
About the Author :
Joan Larkin's newest book is Old Stranger, her sixth collection of poems, published by Alice James Books in August 2024. She is also the author of five previous collections of poetry, including Blue Hanuman (2014); My Body: New and Selected Poems (2007), which received the Audre Lorde Award from the Publishing Triangle; Lambda Literary Award winner Cold River (1997); and Housework (1975). With Jaime Manrique, Larkin translated Sor Juana's Love Poems, a bilingual edition of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz's poetry (1997). Her prose works include If You Want What We Have: Sponsorship Meditations (1998) and& Glad Day: Daily Meditations for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender People (1998). Her plays include The AIDS Passion, The Living, and Wiretap.
Larkin co-founded Out & Out Books during the 1970s feminist literary explosion and has co-edited four anthologies, including Gay and Lesbian Poetry in Our Time. A lifelong teacher, she has served on the faculties of Brooklyn College, Sarah Lawrence College, and Smith College, among others. Larkin has been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She received the 2011 Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America.
Review :
Longlisted for the 2024 Julie Suk Award
"Joan Larkin's Old Stranger records what it means to sit with the discomforting thought of one's mortality without flinching. As Larkin's sixth poetry collection, it is the latest addition to a long line of celebrated work that is unceasingly direct, expansive, and unguarded."
--Laura Gibbs, Sinister Wisdom
"An octogenarian, Larkin has been celebrated for blending lyric and narrative elements in her work and for nudging her poems toward resolution and epiphany....In Old Stranger, Larkin's elegant turns to the lyric mode disregard time but preserve memory, as if their intent is to stop the inevitable, fatal conclusion of human narrative in its tracks."
--Michele Sharpe, On the Seawall
"Separated into four sections, these poems, which include a series of ekphrastic pieces, feel like reflections of a life lived from the perspective of a wise and worldly octogenarian."
--Gregg Shapiro, the Bay Area Reporter
"...the themes displayed in this early sonnet crown--alcoholism, recovery, rape, abortion--are revisited in Old Stranger, urgently, beautifully, almost forty years later."
--Denise Duhamel, Best American Poetry Blog
"Joan Larkin's much-awaited Old Stranger: Poems is a miracle of compression, mystery, and innuendo. Here is a poet for whom craft is an extension of wisdom. Whether revealing the archetype secreted within an object, or the elemental, persistent grief within a memory, Larkin expertly hones the edges of poems like a luthier shapes a violin."
--Diane Seuss, author of Modern Poetry
"In Larkin's Old Stranger: Poems, the credible is given resonance through poems of appetite and assessment. Engaging with curiosity and often startled affection, this poet tells of how it feels to be both enamored and shaken with what connections reveal. Quiet and absorbed, one reads this most graceful of books until pow and one is alerted!"
--Jody Stewart, author of This Momentary World: Selected Poems
"The observant sixth collection from Larkin (Blue Hanuman) offers an extensive miscellany while continuing the poet's career-long interest in the body. ... Amid losses, restitutions, sudden joys, and unknowns, this volume sustains an appealing verve."
--Publishers Weekly
"To discover the 'old stranger' is a knife, not quite, it's an old piano. No, it's a book about mortality and the debt of flesh, about love, rot, relationship, smiles that cut like knives through every seeing moment. It's about painting. It's a beaut. There's so much masterpiece here. I mean, wow, this is why one is a poet all their life. To make this."
--Eileen Myles, author of a "Working Life"
