New Book from C&R Press

Allison Funk's

The Tumbling Box is now available from C&R Press. While laying out and designing this book I of course got to read it. I really enjoyed the series of ekphrastic poems drawn from paintings by Dürer. Here's a sample:

Virgin and Child with a Monkey

After an engraving by Albrecht Dürer (about 1498)

Where has the monkey come from?
The last thing she’d imagine
Among the irises, the lilies of the valley
That fill a German garden.
But she welcomes the creature,
Loves how he wriggles his cute little nose,
Climbs up into her lap to comb his fingers
Through her hair, playing
Just like a child. Sweet thing, she calls him
Before she begins to tire of his chattering.
So much noise, how can a person think?
Try, she tries, but cannot quiet him.
And finding no way out
Of the walled garden they’re in,
She begins to despair,
Looking for a shady section
As far as possible from the commotion.
Everywhere she hides now she hears
His raving, yes, it sounds like raving,
And her son, poor baby,
Days she cannot tell them apart,
One greedy as the next, their babbling
Driving her to distraction, to question
Even her own sense—
Soon the monkey’s tail
Will snake everywhere in her garden,
She’ll see nothing else.

Go order this book. It's worth it. It's good. It's good to buy and read poetry. Lots of other people — famous people — think you should buy this book:

In The Tumbling Box, Allison Funk offers us an exquisite accomplishment: elegant, subtle poems that confront the painful and complex enormity we call love, in particular, parental love. In spite of the best of intentions, in giving birth, we give birth not only to love but to suffering; born, we are borne not only toward love but toward suffering. Rigorously and scrupulously crafted, these lyrics move us with their hard-won wisdom, awe us with their persistent lucidity, and redeem us with their enduring grace.

—Eric Pankey

“Free as one crossing a tightrope,” Allison Funk says in one poem, and that is the freedom of this beautiful book—gracefully poised, perfectly balanced between grief and transformation. These poems are luminous as the paintings and sunlit prairie grass they observe, and piercing as the ancient tales of entrapment and release they re-imagine.
In The Tumbling Box, Allison Funk gives us the miracle of attention embodied in supple and vivid language. Like the most serious artists, she walks the high wire as one intimate with gravity, and these poems are all the more crucial for their exquisite restraint.

—Betsy Sholl

The Tumbling Box is a work of astonishing intimacy and power: subtly crafted, yet emotionally raw, honest and deeply felt, yet never merely confessional. This brave collection travels the darkest of places to emerge, at the last, in clear-sighted, undeceived grace. Allison Funk's journey is both profoundly moving and genuinely uplifting; reading these poems, I felt extraordinarily grateful for their heart-rending and heartening quest—not for a solution, or an escape from pain, but for the hard amen of fellow feeling that the long work of healing reveals.

—John Burnside

Allison Funk is the author of three previous collections of poetry, The Knot Garden, Living at the Epicenter, and Forms of Conversion. She has received the Samuel French Morse Poetry Prize and awards from the Society of Midland Authors, the Poetry Society of America, Poetry, and the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.