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Winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Award

Inspired by nineteenth-century engravings for the Webster’s Dictionary, Engraved explores a fantastic land at the edge of obsolescence and loss. The poems teem with whaling schooners, passenger pigeons, a bayonet, cupola furnace, clavichord—words and objects at the brink of extinction, placed in and around the death of the poet’s father. But these poems also create, or recreate; through illustration, music, and myth, the imagination here allows the dead to reappear, mostly, and sometimes also lets them go. Located at the intersection of art and grief, these poems honor anyone who has set down lines and vanished from the earth.

Tupelo Press
Binding: Paperback, perfect bound
ISBN:  978-1-936797-37-0
Pages:  36
Publish Date: October 2012

Click here to read a poem from Engraved.

Engraved is inspired by engravings created for  Webster's Dictionary in the 19th century, engravings restored and published by John M. Carrera in Pictorial Webster's: A Visual Dictionary of Curiosities in 2009.  To see samples of these marvelous engravings, click here.

Praise for Engraved

"Engraved offers a quietly riveting mix of the observed and the observer. Pictorial images from the dictionary, rendered in words as sharp as the engraver’s knife, are amplified by a mind’s sinuous leaps into their names, connotations, and essences. Meditation erupts into delight or urgency, humor or declaration … I am taken by these readings of the material world because they are (sparingly) complicated by the poet’s own preoccupations. Commentary points beyond the literal to the fear inherent in the very project of the imagination: ‘Creatures / come by night and break the skin / of my heart as if piercing fruit.’ "

—Ellen Doré Watson, final judge, 2011 Snowbound Chapbook Award