RUE by Kathryn Nuernberger

Kathryn Nuernberger’s latest book, Rue, is available for preorder from BOA Editions. One of the poems in the collection, “The Real Thing,” was first published in the Summer 2017 issue of the Gettysburg Review.

The speaker of the poems in Rue finds herself living through a rocky marriage in a conservative rural state, where 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.

Poet Erika Meitner writes, “Rue is a brilliant meditation on corporeality, history, and what it means to move through the natural and material world—be it a field of pennyroyal or the Dollar General—in a female body. Kathryn Nuernberger’s astonishing poems present an urgent and devastating discourse, via many-layered gut-punch narratives, of the complex ways in which we are connected to each other that together become a powerful reckoning on female strength and desire in the #MeToo era.”

Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of the James Laughlin Award-winning The End of Pink (BOA), as well as poetry and lyrical essay collections. Her writing has appeared in 32 Poems, Crazyhorse, Field, Gulf Coast, Poetry Daily, and more. The former director of Pleiades Press, she now teaches at the University of Minnesota MFA program and lives in Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota.