Trio exemplifies how women become a clandestine conduit for life, power, and loss, particularly in the shadow of an implacable patriarchy.
Between two covers are three books:
Planet Parable by Karen Donovan,
Run: A Verse-History of Victoria Woodhull by Diane Raptosh, and
Endless Body by Daneen Wardrop, all previous Etruscan authors. The poems in
Planet Parable discover unexpected meaning in the quotidian recorded against the revelatory background hum of the world. Beginning with a woman using a backhoe to dig up a meadow, it ends with a divine purge, arriving at another beginning. The poems in between tangle with the earth's own signifiers--sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic--written in water, fire, and pressure. Diane Raptosh's collection brings to life one of America's most controversial suffragists, Victoria Woodhull, giving a voice to her immediate circle. Woodhull was the first woman to address Congress and the first woman to run for United States president, with abolitionist Frederick Douglass as running mate. Daneen Wardrop's
Endless Body realizes a mother-daughter-mother lineage through music, quest, and a growing awareness of the body of the world as it traces a daughter's loss of her mother, and the turning from loss to the arrival of that daughter's own daughter. The body may never have assented to its own stern conditions, yet has many callings: tensing, speaking vapor, holding anger and, sometimes, letting us go.
Trio is the second in a series of trilogies from Etruscan Press, the first of which was
Triptych (2020).
Karen Donovan is the author of
Aard-vark to Axolotl, a collection of illustrated short prose (Etruscan, 2018).
Diane Raptosh's fourth book of poetry,
American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press, 2013), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award.
Daneen Wardrop is the author of
Silk Road (Etruscan, 2018).
Karen Donovan is the author of Aard-vark to Axolotl, a collection of illustrated short prose published by Etruscan Press, and two collections of poetry, Your Enzymes Are Calling the Ancients (Persea Books) and Fugitive Red (University of Massachusetts Press). She works for a social enterprise incubator in Providence.
Diane Raptosh's verse collection,
American Amnesiac (Etruscan Press), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award. The recipient of three fellowships in literature from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, she served as the Boise Poet Laureate (2013) as well as the Idaho Writer-in-Residence (2013-2016). In 2018 she won the Idaho Governor's Arts Award in Excellence. A highly active ambassador for poetry, she has given poetry workshops everywhere from riverbanks to maximum security prisons. She teaches literature and creative writing and co-directs the program in Criminal Justice/Prison Studies at the College of Idaho. Her sixth book of poems,
Dear Z: The Zygote Epistles was published by Etruscan Press in July 2020. www.dianeraptosh.com.
Daneen Wardrop has authored four books of poetry:
Silk Road,
The Odds of Being,
Cyclorama, and
Life as It, winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Poetry Society of America Robert H. Winner Award. Her most recent scholarly books include
Emily Dickinson and the Labor of Clothing and
Nurse Narratives: Writing the Civil War, 1863-1870. She has received the Distinguished Faculty award at Western Michigan University, where she teaches poetry and United States literature.
