Sure shot and other poems

the long version

The opening section of Erica Funkhouser's first book of poems since Natural Affinities comprises twenty-six lyric poems of a surpassing tenderness, poems that explore a contemporary woman's response to elemental events and the loves and losses that make up the fabric of our human frailty. Refusing to observe nature complacently, she witnesses the stillbirth of a calf and deconstructs the wild diet of owls, bringing an equally tough precision and richness of emotion to. Family life and the relations of friends and lovers. The inventiveness and humor of these poems, under firm formal control yet warm in their unexpected inner motions, is rare indeed in contemporary poetry. The second part of Sure Shot consists of three poetic monologues that reconsider the history and ideals of America through the eyes of nineteenth-century women - Sacagawea, the Shoshone squaw who guided Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River and across the Rockies to. Reach the Pacific; Louisa May Alcott during her self-sacrificial girlhood in the transcendental colony of Fruitlands in Massachusetts; and Annie Oakley, the renowned sharpshooter who traveled around the world with Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show. These keenly dramatic poems display voices and textures that explore both the inner worlds of these three extraordinary women, and their richly layered responses to some of the central events of the century in which they. Lived. The light in Funkhouser's poems is generous but exacting: she illuminates what we have never noticed before.