A Habit of Landscape by Shelley Armitage

$22.99

 

Shelley Armitage’s poems hold and withhold, gathering artifacts and tracing the demarcations of landscape and life—barbed wire, schist, igneous escarpments, a cellar’s dirt walls—while also acknowledging what cannot be contained, nor ever secured by words.  To do the work of “ancestral ecology,” she roots and uproots, considering what might be salvaged by “looking/in a world wound down.”

–Christopher Bakken

 

Shelley Armitage is a poet aware of mythmaking–of the way we all fill the inexplicable with figures of the imagination. In her poems, she makes a world of presence, of the actual, of the body. She lives inside and celebrates the earthly condition of humanness, of being a thinking animal. A Habit of Landscape is a wonderous collection that reminds us of states of being so fundamental they can only be described as holy.

–Juliet Patterson, Threnody

 

“Crisply vivid, witty, and at once far-seeing and a-whisper with intimacies, Armitage’s poems are a rare and splendid pleasure.  Above all, she reminds us to use the heart to see, to hear, to sing, even unto antelopes, baby foxes, rocks.  Hers is a Texas that shimmers and leaves an afterglow.”
–C.M. Mayo, author of Meteor

 

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A Habit of Landscape

by Shelley Armitage

Full-length Paper

$22.99

979-8-88838-370-4
2023
A Habit of Landscape celebrates the convergent meanings of habit and habitat. each sharing the words “to dwell.”  These poems hold sensate moments—family experiences, inner revelations, transformative places.  A realized kinship between the human and natural worlds signals the inclusiveness of place.  Not something “out there,” this shared space—personal or global– often surprises in the poem’s turn.  Like flash narratives these poems contain worlds in the vibrating fabric of the instant— forgotten, dismissed, previously unseen.  Whether an elegy for a brother, an encounter with a pronghorn, or the whispers surrounding adoption, these lyric pieces speak to the sacrality of the moment.

Shelley Armitage, professor, writer, naturalist, conservationist lives in the Chihuahuan desert in Las Cruces, New Mexico.  She is author of eight award-winning books, most recently Walking the Llano: A Texas Memoir of Place, a Kirkus starred book cited as one of the best memoirs of the year, and a finalist for the May Sarton prize, the New Mexico-Arizona Book Award, and the Collins P. Carr award from the Texas Institute of Letters.

Her work has been featured on NPR and among her other honors are a Wurlitzer Foundation fellowship, a Distinguished Chair in American Literature Fulbright in Warsaw, Fulbright awards in Finland and Portugal, a National Endowment for the Arts grant, three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships, and a Rockefeller grant.

Armitage is professor emerita at the University of Texas at El Paso where she held the Roderick Professorship and is a member of the Texas Institute of Letters.  She manages the family grasslands near Vega, Texas—inspiration for how landscape may draw us into a greater understanding of ourselves and others as we experience kinship with the places we inhabit.

 

 

 

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