Boyishly

Winner, American Book Award, Poetry, 2014. Tanya Olson's poems channel personal experience through myriad adopted voices, speaking through dreams, letters, and imagined historical scenes. Olson turns fresh eyes on archetypal figures and myths, relationships and legends, and landmark failures and successes. By turns vindictive, benevolent, and laudatory, these poems urge us to press toward change by constantly revisiting the past. "Tanya Olson's Boyishly is a magic book. It casts a spell upon you. Olson uses language like Gertrude Stein does, building large monuments of sound into humming lattices, where a 'whale will do as a whale will do,' or where 'tree forms shapes for tiger' and 'tiger takes shape / under tree.' In this book, Olson writes poems to a future America from beyond the planetary gravestone, where there is only a 'boyish summer' and the 'boyish waters.' The voice says come back to me. I am not done with you. I was waiting for you all along."-Dorothea Lasky "Tanya Olson's magnificent poems carry the weight of giants, tigers and The People's Act of Love. And the ribcage hallways of Jonah, 'When inside the whale, it is best to be / inside the whale. Do what you are inside / the whale to do.' Every page is a new cleansing fire. Olson's book Boyishly works the ear and heart hours after reading like a vibrating bell. Waking inside meditation is what the best poems must be, like this book you are about to read, many thanks to Tanya Olson for giving us these strange and beautiful poems." -CA Conrad