Joyful Orphan
Poems
by Mark Irwin
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Pub Date Feb 07 2023 | Archive Date Mar 07 2023
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Description
Through poems of witness, species and habitat extinction, war, pandemic, technology, history, and race, Mark Irwin’s elegant collection of poetry explores the collision between metropolis and wilderness, and engages with forms of spirit that cannot be bound. With the incursion of electronic communication, our connections with one another have been radically distorted. Irwin’s poems confront what it means to be human, and how conflict, along with the interface between technology and humanity, can cause us to become orphaned in many different ways. But it is our decision to be joyful.
Excerpt from “Letter”
Times when we touch hope like the hem of a cloud
just as when we touch a body or door, or think
of the dead come back, romancing
us through the warp of memory, lighting a way
by luring . . .
Advance Praise
“Joyful Orphan is skilled, masterful work.”
—Sherwin Bitsui, Navajo writer and poet, author of Flood Song
“This collection is a deft and elegant lyric address, beautifully inclusive, to all the issues now of greatest concern.”
—Donald Revell, professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and author of The English Boat
“Joyful Orphan is a beautiful book of poems that, while quiet and often domestic, have a long, larger view.”
—Sasha Steensen, professor of English, Colorado State University, and author of House of Deer
“Joyful Orphan raises the question of belonging, and chooses the position of the orphan, who in Mark Irwin’s ecstatic poems, finds home everywhere. Who goes farther than that?”
—Claudia Keelan, professor of English, University of Nevada, Las Vegas, editor of Interim, and author of eight collections of poetry, including We Step into the Sea
Marketing Plan
• The book covers a wide range of contemporary topics, including species and habitat extinction, the Anthropocene era, metropolis and wilderness collision, war, poverty, the incursion of technology, history, and race.
• The title is a reference to the human struggle to survive during the pandemic while living in the Anthropocene era.
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781647790943 |
| PRICE | $17.00 (USD) |
| PAGES | 82 |
Featured Reviews
Meghan G, Reviewer
Joyful Orphan
By Mark Irwin
University of Nevada Press
Publication date: 2/7/23
Poetry
Joyful Orphan is a collection of poems by Mark Irwin. I feel like we are joyfully orphans of the world and ourselves because of how engrossed we are with technology and other nonsense going on in the world.
Some issues that are touched on here: the pandemic, war, technology, the ways in which we are ruining the planet, drugs, and borders.
The poetry wasn’t really for me, but I can see that what the writer has to say is important, relevant, and universal.
Thanks to NetGalley, University of Nevada Press, and Mark Irwin for the opportunity to read and review this work.
Giulia C, Reviewer
I liked the cover; I liked the title. But it seems I thought it would be about something else.
Sometimes I ask myself if it's just me.
I looked up Mark Irwin and found out he's a professor who teaches poetry. I can't help but feel that it shows.
Some of these poems sound to me like something I've already heard. Again, and again and again.
They follow the same formula as a million other poems by poets that came out the last twenty years - and I've already read them. Chasing the rhythm of modern poetry and poems, with embellishments that are there when there isn't any message to find. I read them and by the end I'm like "so what was that about?". So I read them again and I make sense of the poems, I understand English, I know syntax and I have a good vocabulary. But, again, what was that about?
That said, there were some poems I found "true". In the sense that they felt like something, and not a copy of something; most of them were about some kind of loss - be it family, culture or the old world in its natural state [Blue, Red; Family; Was Into Space; English; Hover; Joyful Orphan].
I always find myself glad to have enjoyed even just a little component in a book. I may not have determined the whole book to be "good" in itself, but those good parts make the read worth it by the end.
