Break us, says Donna Spector, and love pours out. In The Woman Who Married Herself, poetry pours out as well, in poems of heartbreak and nostalgia, irony and laughter, reverie and acuity. This is a poetry that probes at life, discovering in the dramatic encounters with the past and present a knowledge of the world and of oneself that deepens and enriches our lives, too, marrying sensitivity with intelligence. Paul Kane, Work Life In the Woman Who Married Herself, Donna Spector gives us the gift of honesty and specificity to create powerful and rooted poems that bring us to tears. She makes us believe we know the people she writes about, know the complexities of life with all its confusion and shame, love and loss. These poems teach us how to survive. You ll want to read this book again and again. Maria Mazziotti Gillan, All That Lies Between Us Donna Spector s book is wonderful--surreal, quirky, comical, full of life. Poems of childhood and family history, lovers and longing, travel, love as a search for life. Poems about her teachers--John Berryman, Thom Gunn, Louis Simpson. The Woman Who Married Herself [o]pened boxes of china/so fine she could hold/a plate to the light and see her own/life beyond. A perfect description of this book. Sharon Doubiago, Selected and New Poems This is Donna Spector s film of The Woman Who Married Herself. Made by an auteur with a flair for art direction and cinematography, each poem is an illuminated scene in this Life, the Movie. Filming her story her LA childhood, her complex ethnicity, The White Rose of her mother as Blanche Dubois at Penn Station, lovers, travels, John Berryman dissecting his students dreams, or the heroine sewing her own wedding gown out of parachute silk Spector aims her camera at authentic particulars and does so with humor and sensual craft. Janet Hamill, Body of Water Spector shakes the family tree, and out fall myths. In lavish detail, she also ushers in lovers, friends, mentors, and strangers in settings as diverse as Greece, New York, Los Angeles, Berkeley in the 60's. Losses do not add up to despair; she embraces both the beauty and sorrow of her world. This woman who marries herself is resilient, wry, steely, compassionate. If all the world's a stage, "The Play Is Love."
About the Author
Donna Spector is a playwright as well as a poet. Her play Golden Ladder (Women Playwrights: The Best Plays of 2002) was produced Off Broadway, as was her first play, Another Paradise. Winner of the Masters Poetry Prize, she received two National Endowment for the Humanities grants to study in Greece as well as grants from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the New York Council for the Arts. Her work has appeared in The Greensboro Review, Poet & Critic, Sycamore Review, Notre Dame Review, The Paterson Literary Review, The Bellingham Review, Poet Lore and many other literary magazines and anthologies; a program of her poems was aired on Australia national radio. Although the first half of her life was spent in Los Angeles and Berkeley, she now lives in an old farmhouse in Warwick, New York.
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