Earnest, Earnest?

Earnest, Earnest?

Poems

‘Please forgive the public nature of this postcard’ writes Eleanor Boudreau, spilling tea on love and its reckless participants. It's a wet business, like dry cleaning. It's a combination of two very elements held together in suspension, like smoke (or rubber?) And it is the thriving pulse of these desultory postcards from the edge of an affair's landscape of exile and afterhood. What a witty, glorious, and bittersweet book. I am here for all of it.

D.A. Powell

Winner, Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize
Finalist, 2021 Eric Hoffer Award
Silver Medal, 2020 Florida Book Award

In Earnest, Earnest?, the speaker, Eleanor, writes postcards to her on-again-off-again lover, Earnest. The fact that her lover’s name is Earnest and that their relationship is fraught, raises questions of sincerity and irony, and whether both can be present at the same time. While Earnest can be read literally as Eleanor’s lover, he is best understood as another side of the poet’s self. The ambiguity at play in Earnest, Earnest? is embodied in the form of the “Earnest Postcards” that structure the book—these postcards are experimental in their use of images and formal in their dialogue with the sonnet. Thus, Earnest, Earnest? is a question of tone, address, and form.

Table of Contents

Sample

62 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

September, 2020

isbn : 9780822966302

Series

Pitt Poetry Series

Subjects

Poetry / Women Authors

about the author

Eleanor Boudreau is a poet who has worked as a dry-cleaner and as a radio reporter. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Tin House, Barrow Street, Waxwing, Willow Springs, FIELD, Copper Nickel, and other journals. Currently, she is finishing her PhD and teaching creative writing at Florida State University.

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