Boxed Juice

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Boxed Juice is a rare and original work that makes clear why Danielle Chapman is so vital to contemporary poetry. Spontaneous and indelible, enchanting and disillusioned, extravaga nt and direct, these poems reveal what Chapman sees from within roles that our culture often renders invisible or ridiculous — mother, caregiver, Christian mystic, literary wife. From the taut, linguistically nimble stanzas of "Unspeakable" and "Kumquat" to the devastating and funny lyric essay at the book's center, Chapman invokes constraints even as she exuberantly shatters them. Yet, as acclaimed poet and critic Peter Campion notes in his foreword, "for all its elegance, this remains a work pitched against despair, an act of survival." Chapman and her husband, Christian Wiman, had been married for only 10 months when, in 2005, he was diagnosed with a rare, incurable form of lymphoma, an event that ignited the couple's mutual thirst for God, and their quest for poems that could capture it. Chapman's work witnesses that harrowing story even as it maps a vision forward, stubbornly relishing the mischief and the joy, the ecstasy and absurdity — and, above all, the sound — of life, even when threatened by catastrophe. Following Delinquent Palaces (TriQuarterly, 2015), Boxed Juice distills Chapman's craft into a miracle of resilience. Danielle Chapman's poems are those of a spirit in whom the experience of being crushed is saved by the music that it yields. Danielle Chapman is a poet, nonfiction, writer, and lecturer in English at Yale University. Her memoir, Holler: A Poet Among Patriots, was released by Unbound Edition Press in 2023. Her previous collection of poems is Delinquent Palaces (Northwestern University Press, 2015). She teaches Shakespeare and creative writing and lives in Hamden, Connecticut with her husband, Christian Wiman, and their twin daughters, Fiona and Eliza. "Boxed Juice is something rare, an original vision of being that…makes Danielle Chapman so important to poetry right now. [Her] poems are tenacious and surprising, wild and fated, there with us for the bad as well as the good. No matter where we may wish to be, they meet us in the world where we are." - Peter Campion, from the foreword "The poems [in Boxed Juice] are strikingly precise, their beautiful deployments of image and perception powerfully constrained, not unlike nectar whose attar and sensory reach are all the more intoxicating for their confinement… It is when Chapman brings… high-church lyric perceptions into juxtaposition with a keen eye and ear for the quotidian that the magic, paratactically, happens." - Lisa Russ Spaar "Everything is alive and fully charged in Chapman's poetry of ardor and loss, survival and renewal as she revels in the music of language — the fruitiness of vowels, the clash of consonants, the swoon of rhyme. Incisive, bemused, and impassioned, Chapman gives strong and lucid voice to the rapture of existence and the mysteries of consciousness." - Donna Seaman "Danielle Chapman's poetry is brilliant, mysterious, and impetuous in its quest for intensity. Like Gerard Manley Hopkins, she knows the secret to charging the world with grandeur, with words and their music; like his windhover, her words buckle in two senses: both secured and 'haltedin a breakbeat'." - Ange Mlinko Show more