Share the Wealth
Share the Wealth trains a wry and closely-observing eye on chance, exploring a world in which we collectively stand always on the brink of change – for good or ill. Sometimes the roll of the die delights: Cherry leaves turn into tortillas, snowbanks wear makeup, and hotdog-sized caterpillars wander the night, munching pecan leaves. But death and hazard are present here, lurking beneath world's abundance – its overflow of bookstores, turkeys, paintings, freeways, and flowers. Still, these poems attune the reader to the strange riotous-ness of the universe, its wealth of natural abundance, sensory detail, and time. Balanced between gain and loss, these poems allow room for bliss as much as decay.
PRAISE FOR SHARE THE WEALTH
I’d call Maureen Thorson’s Share the Wealth quietly captivating, if it didn’t truthtell so insistently and open the mind with bright images that make familiarities like January, for example, more permanently real than they’ve ever been: “And last year’s flowerpots drift in the snowpack // burnt sugar dusk persistent non-roar / of the highway over the river /that uses the thick light like pomade.” Other moments skate by like Olympians, and you only recognize their power when they’ve left you behind, marveling, like this one tucked into an encounter with some skittish wild turkeys: “This world is chockablock / with death and joy and hazard, / and it would be right for a woman alone / to be its scariest thing.” These poems comfort and discomfit, coaxing weirdness out of the familiar, deep emotion out of the natural world, acceptance out of tragedy. You’ll find this book’s unique perceptions—for a moment, for good—will locate themselves somewhere in you.
—Kathleen Ossip, author of July
ABOUT THE POET
Maureen Thorson is the author of Share the Wealth (Veliz Books, 2022), On Dreams (Bloof Books 2021), My Resignation (Shearsman 2014), and Applies to Oranges (Ugly Duckling Presse 2011), as well as the chapbook Mayport, which won the Poetry Society of America's national chapbook fellowship for 2006. She lives in Falmouth, Maine.
Maureen Thorson’s website: maureenthorson.com
Cover image: Pyrus communis © Royal Charles Steadman (1923) U.S. Department of Agriculture Pomological Watercolor Collection. Rare and Special Collections, National Agricultural Library, Beltsville, MD 20705
