Rue

One of Big Other's Most Anticipated Small Press Books of 2020

In this fiercely feminist ecopoetic collection, Kathryn Nuernberger reclaims love and resilience in an age of cruelty.

As the speaker--an artist and intellectual--finds herself living through a rocky marriage in a conservative rural state, she maintains her sense of identity by studying the science and folklore of plants historically used for birth control. Her botanical portraits of common herbs like Queen Anne's lace and pennyroyal are interwoven with lyric biographies of groundbreaking women ecologists whose stories have been left untold in textbooks.

With equal parts righteous fury and tender wisdom, Rue reassesses the past and recontextualizes the present to tell a story about breaking down, breaking through, and breaking into an honest, authentic expression of self.

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two previous poetry collections, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. She has also written a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. Fascinated by the history of science and the natural world, she has received research fellowships from the H. J. Andrews Research Forest, American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life. Other awards include an NEA fellowship and the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems and essays have appeared widely in journals, including 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Field, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry International, West Branch, Willow Springs, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Ohio University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. After spending many years directing Pleiades Press, she now teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota and lives with her family in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN.