Carta Marina

Overview

A vivid, strange, and beautiful account of a year in Sweden, this poem represents the ways in which wildness and monstrousness, dream and terror, coexist forever with constructions of order. Inspired by a medieval map of the same name, the poem weaves the gloom of the author’s forgotten past with the pain and pleasures of her present life, creating a treatise on motherhood, marriage, love, forgiveness, reconnection, and abandonment.

Reviews

"A breakthrough book from a significant poet." —Booklist

"Passionately and precisely, sensuously and learnedly, Ann Fisher-Wirth’s Carta Marina maps the terrain of our earthly fidelities and losses, calling them forth in all their varying shapes and flavors, by name. These poems summon abundance, recording in their pages a fully inhabited, fully inhabitable world." —Jane Hirshfield, award-winning poet

Author Biography

Ann Fisher-Wirth teaches English and environmental studies at the University of Mississippi. She received the Rita Dove Poetry Award and two Poetry Fellowships from the Mississippi Arts Commission. She has also received the Fulbright Distinguished Chair in American Studies at Uppsala University, Sweden. She is the author of Blue Windows and Five Terraces. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi.