Description
Life takes many turns from birth to death and back, through love and illness, trauma and ecstasy. In Making the Turn, Wyatt Townley navigates these sometimes sharp and hairpin curves with brilliance and grace. Each section bookmarks a turn in life that turns toward the next. Trained by the curve, leaving becomes returning, turning away becomes turning around, and revolution becomes revelation.
Punctuated by profound art by renowned Chinese artist Hong Chun Zhang, Making the Turn speaks across race, age, and culture.
Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of Kansas Emerita. Making the Turn is her seventh book and fifth volume of poetry, including Rewriting the Body, The Breathing Field, Perfectly Normal, and The Afterlives of Trees. Her work has been read on NPR, featured in American Life in Poetry, and published in journals ranging from New Letters to Newsweek, North American Review to Paris Review, Yoga Journal to Scientific American. Commissioned poems hang in the Johnson County Library and the Space Telescope Science Institute Library, home of the Hubble.
A Chinese born and US based artist, Hong Chun Zhang, received B.F.A. from Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing before moving to the United States in 1996. She has been living and working in Lawrence KS since 2004 after graduating from the M.F.A. program at the University of California, Davis.
For over twenty years, Hong’s studio practice has evolved from explorations of self to broader themes of gender, cross-culture, environment, and more recently, social justice. Her trademark of large black and white drawings of disembodied hair has been exhibited in Asia, Europe and North America.
Lost Horse Press
$24 / 979-8-9933139-1-7 / Pbk. / 96 pages
