O Holy Insurgency

Name: O Holy Insurgency
SKU: 978-1-937854-20-1
Price: 14.00 USD
Availability: InStock

Publication Date: February 2013

Description

Mary Biddinger’s second full-length poetry collection, O Holy Insurgency, wrenches the love poem out of the terrain of hearts and flowers, and transplants it into a gritty Midwestern paradise where broken glass becomes a shimmering beacon, and no river is too polluted to dazzle a pair of lovers on its banks. The emotional landscape of this book is at once holy and unholy, concerned with the spirit as much as the body, and convinced that the two can never part, despite the fiscal swoon and threat of war. Fearless and bold, like a wink to a stranger in a crowded room, Biddinger’s O Holy Insurgency chronicles both triumph and struggle, a testament to a world as sacred as it is doomed.

Praise

“Think O for open and O for eye, a wandering mouth in search of surprises. The heroine of Mary Biddinger’s brilliant new collection subs rapid-fire syntax for Bond girl bullets: “Of course we didn’t have / guns. We were too fast to need them.” In this eerie prairie town, box fans reproduce in bushes and toaster ovens face eviction from countertops. Biddinger lets objects highlight the wreckage of Capitalist excess: ‘It wasn’t a paper flower they left / at the crash site, but somebody’s / underpants, dimpled with rain.’ What’s holy is passion, our heroine’s thorny femininity and devout hedonism. O Holy Insurgency documents Biddinger’s irreverent compassion and edgy sensuality: ‘you / invented me with your mouth. / We were cut from the same cloth/of awesomeness. Our glory / could stop wars. The azaleas shut / their blooms when you opened / me.'”

-Carol Guess

With equal parts wit and wisdom, Mary Biddinger’s O Holy Insurgency does what all good poetry does: she entertains while demonstrating both social and personal awareness; she rouses, comforts, and frightens the reader (often in the same poem) in the best way possible. Sometimes surreal, always poignant, Biddinger’s lyricism transcends the whitewash of contemporary verse and gives us something both familiar and new.”

-Michael Meyerhofer

O Holy Insurgency, o hymn to sacred transgressions, to Eros’ transubstantiations, to the beloved as doppelganger, as double-dog dare, as flaming conflagration of holy spirit that both purifies and destroys, and will not be quenched or exorcised. These poems, with their crisp pivots and dove-tail joints, rise from the dingy quotidian of the American rust belt like the electric glitter of a welder’s torch. They spark and tingle like a 9-volt battery placed upon the tongue.”

-Lee Ann Roripaugh

About the Author

Mary Biddinger

Mary Biddinger is the author of numerous books with Black Lawrence Press, including Department of Elegy (2022) and Partial Genius: Prose Poems (2019). She is also co-editor, with Julie Brooks Barbour, of A Mollusk Without a Shell: Essays on Self-Care for Writers (University of Akron Press, 2024). Her debut work of fiction, a novella in linked flash stories titled The Girl with the Black Lipstick, will be published by BLP in July 2025. Biddinger teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Akron and in the NEOMFA program. She has received awards and fellowships from the Cleveland Arts Prize, Ohio Arts Council, and National Endowment for the Arts. Her current project is a new collection of prose poems about feral 1980s childhood and a close-knit block on the northwest side of Chicago.

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