Let’s All Die Happy

Uncertainty, disappointment, and patriarchy pervade a landscape of lost dreams and unexpected realities in Adair-Hodges's gloriously sardonic debut. . . It's a gritty and bewitching collection that revels in its vulnerability; Adair-Hodges incisively translates visceral emotions into tangible imagery while remaining emotionally fluid and preserving the integrity of her sorrow.
Publishers Weekly
Winner, 2016 Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize

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The poems in Let’s All Die Happy explore apostasy, concerned with what happens after the beliefs and institutions which promised fulfillment leave us empty instead. Through a darkly humorous lens, it also examines a patriarchal culture in which women are defined through their relationship to others and how this inheritance weighs heavily not only on the lives we lead but shapes what life it is possible to even imagine having. Ultimately, the poems push against these containers, burning through the stages of a woman’s life until there’s nothing left but to invent what’s next, finding both loneliness and liberation in this reclamation.

80 Pages, 6 x 9 in.

November, 2017

isbn : 9780822965145

about the author

Erin Adair-Hodges

Erin Adair-Hodges is the author of Let’s All Die Happy, winner of the Agnes Lynch Starrett Poetry Prize. Recipient of the Allen Tate Prize and the Loraine Williams Poetry Prize, her work has been featured in American Poetry Review, Gulf Coast, Kenyon Review, PBS NewsHour, Ploughshares, Sewanee Review, and more. Born and raised in New Mexico, she now lives with her family in Kansas City, Missouri, and works as a fiction acquisitions editor.

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Erin Adair-Hodges