{"product_id":"spine-of-the-hug-1","title":"Spine of the Hug","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eSpine of the Hug: Poems\u003c\/i\u003e by Alec Hershman is a debut collection more than twenty years in the making: fifty-three lyric poems rooted in the landscapes of Michigan and Kentucky that move through grief, desire, caregiving, and the long aftermath of childhood with rare precision and emotional courage.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOrganized in three sections, [Stillness], [So I Came to Learn], and [The Past Will End], the collection traces the arc of a life: from the vivid, unresolved textures of childhood through the intimate territories of desire and loss to the long, patient work of memory and self-knowledge. The poems inhabit a world of caregiving and dying, of desire rendered obliquely, of childhood as a country that does not release its citizens. They are populated by a mother waving from the water and receding, a gambler stepping into daylight after a long night, a boy in a swimming pool turning blue from shyness, a dying man whose breath sounds like quails signing air in the thickets.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eWorking in the tradition of Larry Levis, whose epigraph opens the collection, and shaped by the teaching of Carl Phillips and Frank Bidart, \u003ci\u003eSpine of the Hug\u003c\/i\u003e brings to American lyric poetry a distinctly contemporary sensibility: queer, geographically rooted, and unflinching in its attention to what the body knows and what the mind refuses to say.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Iron Oak Editions","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":52932494360893,"sku":"9798989608478","price":18.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0477\/8731\/1254\/files\/9798989608478ita_399284d0-3762-491a-a505-1c065001d2fe.jpg?v=1787771041","url":"https:\/\/itascabooks.com\/products\/spine-of-the-hug-1","provider":"Itasca Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}