Chez Robert Giron

“The Origin of the Milky Way” Jacopo TINTORETTO
© The National Gallery, London.

Gival Press is pleased to announce the release of The Origin of the Milky Way by Barbara Louise Ungar Winner of the Gival Press Poetry Award.

The collection has received advance praise from the following:

“Barbara Louise Ungar's The Origin of the Milky Way is a fearless, unflinching collection about birth and motherhood, the transformation of bodies. Ungar's poems are honestly brutal, candidly tender. Their primal immediacy and intense intimacy are realized through her dazzling sense of craft. Ungar delivers a wonderful, sensuous, visceral poetry.”–Denise Duhamel

“Ungar's mesoblastic poetry refreshes the tattered Modern Soul!”
—Sparrow, author of Yes, You ARE a Revolutionary!

“... By turns witty and euphoric, panic-stricken and exalted, Ungar does comedy and rage, tenderness and meditation in poems consistently inventive and intelligent.”
—Peg Boyers

“Barbara Ungar’s new book is a departure: her earlier work was all about the joy, the sudden access of energy she pulled from ‘the used, the worn, the broken in.’ This book is about giving birth out of one’s own body to another body. She confronts the exhilarations and terrors (as well as, she fears, sweet delusions) of birth frontally, even ruthlessly. The unit here is mother and son. As soon as she is pregnant, for the speaker the father ceases to exist. This is a compelling mirror.”
—Frank Bidart

“… Ungar has touched on something vital to all of us—‘in the last, we grow and do not know / how or who is holding us, yet we are held.’”—Donna J. Gelagotis Lee, judge of the 2006 Gival Press Poetry Award and author of On the Altar of Greece

Biography:
Barbara Louise Ungar is the author of Thrift, which was a finalist for the May Swenson Poetry Award and the Tupelo Prize. Her poems have appeared in Salmagundi, The Minnesota Review, The Cream City Review, The Literary Review, and other publications. She is also the author of Haiku in English and the chapbooks Sequel and Neoclassical Barbra. An associate professor of English at the College of Saint Rose in Albany, New York, she lives in Saratoga Springs with her son Izaak.



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