Undress, She Said - Paperback

by Doug Anderson (Author)

In Doug Anderson's newest collection, Undress, She Said, we accompany a speaker undaunted by the complex reckonings of history, evolving relationships, and an aging body, a speaker that, besieged by a storm, resolves to "set out into it, the wind / playing the rigging like a harp." Over and over in these pages, Anderson makes music of the gales and rain and turbulent sea. These poems voyage from the subtle violences of a religious upbringing to complex remembrances of time served in the Vietnam War to contemporary emergencies of real and political plagues. Yet, no matter the subject, compassion rudders these lyrics as they turn always and at last to myriad beloveds-the enigmatic Angel of Death, literary and mythological influences, kind strangers, the constantly elusive and elusively constant moon. These words reach out to the reader the way the poet addresses frozen joy from the confines of winter: "Red berry trapped in ice, / let me touch you."

Author Biography

Doug Anderson's first book of poetry, The Moon Reflected Fire, won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award in 1995, and Blues for Unemployed Secret Police received a grant from the Eric Mathieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets. His memoir Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. His work has appeared in many literary journals including Asheville Poetry Review, Field, Nine Mile, Ploughshares, Poetry, Southern Review, Massachusetts Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He has received fellowships and grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, and other funding organizations. In addition to poetry and creative nonfiction he has written plays, screenplays, and journalism. His most recent book of poems is Horse Medicine (Barrow Street Press, 2015). He has taught in the Pacific University of Oregon and Bennington College MFA programs, and he is a teaching affiliate of the Joiner Institute for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences at UMASS Boston. He has written critical work for the Boston Globe, Counterpunch, the New York Times Book Review, and the Times Literary Supplement (London).