Small Enterprise - Softcover

Poetry. The time: creeping toward the millennium, yet before Y2K panic inspires everyone to stockpile bottled water and cheap wine. The place: a Midwestern metropolis with echoes of Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, a city trying to preserve the past as a future arrives with gut rehabs and shuttered churches. The dramatis personae: corner bar denizens, bad girls with big plans, novels and their writers, a petulant lake, flocks of grandmothers with rosaries, a wrecking ball or two. Mary Biddinger's fourth full- length collection of poems, SMALL ENTERPRISE, introduces us to a world of risk and risk management, a continual struggle to stay afloat, and a hot triangular romance between man, woman, and city.

Mary Biddinger is the author of the poetry collections Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), SAINT MONICA (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), O HOLY INSURGENCY (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), A SUNNY PLACE WITH ADEQUATE WATER (Black Lawrence Press, 2014) and SMALL ENTERPRISE (Black Lawrence Press, 2015). She is also co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, Green Mountains Review, jubilat, The Laurel Review, and Pleiades, among others. She edits the Akron Series in Poetry at the University of Akron, where she is a Professor of English. Biddinger is the recipient of a 2015 NEA creative writing fellowship in poetry.