Small Enterprise by Mary Biddinger :: Now Available for Preorder! :: Black Lawrence Publishing

Small Enterprise by Mary Biddinger
Now Available for Preorder!

The time: creeping toward the millennium, yet before Y2K panic inspires everyone to stockpile bottled water and cheap wine. The place: a Midwestern metropolis with echoes of Chicago, Cleveland, and Detroit, a city trying to preserve the past as a future arrives with gut rehabs and shuttered churches. The dramatis personae: corner bar denizens, bad girls with big plans, novels and their writers, a petulant lake, flocks of grandmothers with rosaries, a wrecking ball or two. Mary Biddinger’s fourth full-length collection of poems, Small Enterprise, introduces us to a world of risk and risk management, a continual struggle to stay afloat, and a hot triangular romance between man, woman, and city.

Praise

In Mary Biddinger's Small Enterprise we find a brilliant wackiness that slips into surreality that slips into memory that slips into dream—and then back again. We find a pile of memos from the most interesting Risk Management department on earth. And we find a bewilderingly smart narrator who looks at the world like this: “When I met the machine that eventually/would replace me, all I thought was/ how it filled the room with sun pools/and erroneous static.” Biddinger’s enterprise, in all its departments and gears and springs, is indeed small—it shrinks until it implodes, comes out the other side as the absolute-vast: “One team lost its ball, played soccer with a globe.”

—Sarah Vap

These poems, the best I've seen yet in a career that already outshines most living poets (and plenty of dead ones), offer still more evidence that Mary Biddinger is one of the best, most entertaining poets out there. But these aren't just exercises in clever line breaks and punchy imagery. With her trademark blend of wit, surprise, and poignancy, Biddinger scrutinizes the many spheres of human existence, further pushing the stylistic envelope whilst maintaining her fidelity to art that matters, to language that roundhouses the psyche into something dizzyingly close to enlightenment.

—Michael Meyerhofer

RISK MANAGEMENT MEMO: CONTINUING EDUCATION

Tonight’s theme is: you are a baby nihilist.
Tonight even the polyester curtains are an opiate

worth banning. I’m a terrible student, victim
of harrowing perfectionism mixed with remnants

of crazy-legged wonder. Not to mention
inelegance. My renegade professor’s mistakes

declared genius by an academy composed
of countless lake flies and a sinister duffel bag.

If this is the library, then I’m the only one
doing the shelving, which is fine. I know enough

numbers to enter the right bus with shoulders
thrown back like he taught me: This is your

mean walk, this is your into-a-lake-walk
which ends in unspeakable tragedy. Save

the lake bottom for other rocks. Don’t let
anyone walk through your body, little cadet.

But the best way to learn is to disobey.
And that was the first thing he ever taught me.

This poem first appeared in Guernica

About the Poet

Mary Biddinger is the author of the poetry collections Prairie Fever (Steel Toe Books, 2007), Saint Monica (Black Lawrence Press, 2011), O Holy Insurgency (Black Lawrence Press, 2013), and A Sunny Place with Adequate Water (Black Lawrence Press, 2014). She is also co-editor of The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics (U Akron Press, 2011). She teaches literature and poetry writing at The University of Akron, where she edits the Akron Series in Poetry. Biddinger is the recipient of a 2015 National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship in poetry.

ISBN: 978-1-62557-925-6

Price: $13.95

Preorder Price: $11.95

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