Marilyn Annucci

CONTACT:

Email: annuccim@uww.edu
Website: www.marilynannucci.com

BIO:
Marilyn Annucci's book, The Arrows That Choose Us, is the winner of the 2018 Press 53 Poetry Award, and you can find the book at Press 53. Marilyn is also the author of two chapbooks: Waiting Room, which won the 2012 Sunken Garden Poetry Prize (Hill-Stead Museum), and Luck (Parallel Press). Her work has appeared in various journals, including Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Rattle, North American Review, Wisconsin People & Ideas, Verse Wisconsin, VerseWrights, and Antiphon. Her work is also in the 2017 edition of New Poetry from the Midwest (New American Press, 2017). She is a professor in the Department of Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin–Whitewater. Find her at www.marilynannucci.com

PUBLICATIONS:

The Arrows That Choose Us is the winner of the 2018 Press 53 Poetry Award, forthcoming in April 2018.

Waiting Room is the winner of the 2012 Hillstead Museum Sunken Garden Poetry Prize. $10.00. Order directly from Marilyn.

Luck, Parallel Press

“There’s a wry compassion for the human in all of the various, exquisite poems in this collection WAITING ROOM. Sometimes the speaker is the one on the cross, or at the crossroads, sometimes it is a stray dog, or a loved one with Parkinson’s. The imagination is our angel, the speaker knows, and language is the unsentimental, inventive, tender genius that makes poems like this possible. Superb work.”
— Tony Hoagland

Poetry

Whole Foods

are so much better than little bits, little chewed off
pieces of foods one might leave for a bird or a woman
without a home.  Not whole, as in lacking parts: broccoli
without heads, potatoes missing eyes.  Maimed foods.
Pork chops on their last legs.  Tomatoes with their skins
blown off.  Bread crumbs.  The whole crumby world out
there, not in here.  Whole, as in what more could you ask
for: bright organic peppers in the jet of the spritzer.  Crisp
stalks of celery, fennel, white asparagus.  Complete, as in
all of us together, smiling, restored, fully realized as we reach
for that tiramisu.  Rich, as in not poor, not stuck with radiated
beef, milk, mutated chickens, as in not free, not free-range at all.  

The Women of the Kazan Cathedral
St. Petersburg, Russia

Quick ancients in kerchiefs
move quietly as breath

among carousels of candles,
snuffing the slender tapers

like stumps of cigarillos,
tossing them into the tin pail.  

If the inch of wax still holds prayer,
still possesses the pilgrim’s desire

to burn all the way down,
It doesn’t matter

these Mothers of Christ
say with their silence, 

say with their refusal
to meet your eyes.

Another stub, another prayer
has burned long enough.