The Blue Dress
Alison Townsend

$14.95 144 pages ISBN 1-893996-61-1

The Marie Alexander Poetry Series
Volume 6 -- sample [PDF]

In this quiet, clear-eyed collection, Townsend meditates on loss - childhood bereavemet, depression, divorce - to arrive at the realization that it is through loss that we come to possess some of life's most profound gifts.

Alison Townsend is also the author of What the Body Knows. Her work has appeared in many journals, including The North American Review, The Southern
Review, Calyx, and Fourth Genre, and been widely anthologized, most recently in Are You Experienced? and A Fierce Brightness. She teaches English at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater.

"The Blue Dress is filled with a capacious,
multi-faceted, and above all, physical knowledge. That
the life of the body is both our vulnerability and our
salvation is a wisdom running throughout these poems'
hard-won, bravery rendered record of losses and
loves."
-Jane Hirshfield

"The project of Alison Townsend's poetry is to chart a
course through the deepest of losses -to attempt some
safe passage through a lifetime's erasures. Intimate,
warm, and observant, this book involves us in the
inscription of a life."
-Mark Doty

"Alison Townsend's articulation of sorrows has always
cast an aura, of beauty, and deepest, truest
instruction. I've always, instinctively, moved toward
it, have always missed it when it was absent. Delicate
pieces of memory, mood, and self - self examining
itself- of hope and despair, of crystalline light
shining through "grief solid as a rock," the seemingly
unsayable grief of a mother's death... in The Blue
Dress, Alison Townsend says it."
-Sharon Doubiago