When the Next Big War Blows Down the Valley: Selected and New Poems - Softcover

Poetry. What a cause for celebration: an extended visit to Terese Svoboda's expansive and piercing vision, in which curiosity collides with critique and sparks wisdom, ignites wonder. The unsettling dynamics of family, the anxieties of global politics, and the surprising encounters with the architecture of everyday life shape "the membrane of lived moments" of this fierce and formidable book.

"WHEN THE NEXT BIG WAR BLOWS DOWN THE VALLEY may be a place where 'every word from everyone hurts,' but take solace, dear reader, Svoboda will turn each ache into an exquisite tune."—Rigoberto González

"Terese Svoboda's poetry is at once so remarkably precise and utterly strange I find my mind marrying her vision with vertigo and delight. Her SELECTED AND NEW is not just a treasure trove: it's a must-have for any serious reader of poetry. Dive in! I'll be waiting for you in the 'Marriage Boat' where Svoboda's gulls scream, 'Flesh! Flesh!'"—Cate Marvin

Terese Svoboda is the translator of CLEANED THE CROCODILE'S TEETH: NUER SONG (Greenfield Review Press, 1985) and the author of All Aberration (University of Georgia Press, 1985), Laughing Africa (University of Iowa Press, 1991), Treason (Zoo Press, 2003), Mere Mortals (University of Georgia Press, 2009), Weapons Grade (University of Arkansas, 2009), and WHEN THE NEXT BIG WAR BLOWS DOWN THE VALLEY: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS (Anhinga Press, 2015), and the chapbook Dogs Are Not Cats. A recent Guggenheim recipient, she has won the Iowa Prize in Poetry, the Cecil Hemley Award and the Emily Dickinson Prize from the Poetry Society of America, and a New York Foundation for the Arts grant.

A fellow at Bellagio, Bogliasco, Yaddo, the James Merrill House, MacDowell, and the NEH, she also received a PEN/Columbia fellowship to translate Nuer song. She has taught at Williams, Columbia's School of the Arts, Southampton/Stony Brook, the New School, San Francisco State, William and Mary, Fairleigh Dickinson, Sarah Lawrence, Bennington, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Universities of Tampa, Miami, and Hawaii, Fordham, and Wichita State, in St. Petersburg and Kenya for the Summer Literary Program, and held the McGee Professor at Davidson College. Also the author of six books of fiction, a memoir, and a book of translation from the Nuer, she will publish a biography of the radical poet Lola Ridge in 2016.