Through the Square Window

Overview

Fertility, pregnancy, and the landscape of early childhood are themes explored in this collection of poems, which are by turns tender, exuberant, and unsettling. Pitched against envious dead, these diverse narratives of birth and its consequences are rooted in literary and historical contexts—from Aristotle’s theory of spontaneous generation to Lewis Carroll’s Alice—that amplify the depth of the collection. These selections are an examination of motherhood and infancy, which is the rich and contested territory in which what it means to be human in a precarious world is disclosed.

Reviews

"The poems in this book will surprise you; I hope they will delight you."  —Guardian on The State of the Prisons

"A book of splendors."  —Irish Times on The State of the Prisons

Author Biography

Sinéad Morrisey is an award-winning poet who lectures on creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in Belfast. She is the author of Between Here and There, The State of the Prisons, and There Was Fire in Vancouver. She received the Lannan Literary Fellowship in 2007 and has won numerous awards, including the Eric Gregory Award, the Michael Hartness Poetry Prize, the Patrick Kavanagh Award, and the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award. In addition, she has had selections short-listed for such prizes as the Irish Times Poetry Prize, the John Llewellyn Rhys Commonwealth Literature Prize, and the T. S. Eliot Prize.