Applies to Oranges

My first book, Applies to Oranges, was published by Ugly Duckling Presse in 2011. Check out the press release and ordering information here.

interviews

Kate Greenstreet interviewed me about the book over at Bookslut. Check it out to learn all my arcane, citric secrets.

Stephen McLaughlin interviewed me for Jacket2's Into the Field feature. Oranges are on the discussion list -- so round, so mysterious.

reviews

You can find Jacket2's review here.

Jim Warner reviewed A2O for The 570.com.

Here is The Volta's review of A2O.

The Rumpus reviews Applies to Oranges here.

Impose reviews A2O here.

Coldfront named Applies to Oranges one of its Top 30 Poetry Books for 2011.

BOMBlog reviews the book here.

You can find Publishers Weekly's take here.

NewPages reviews Applies to Oranges here.

Geof Huth also posted a lengthy and very kind review of the book over at dbqp: visualizing poetics.

Thanks also to Maureen Doallas and Trevor Calvert for their reviews!

book trailers

Try the long trailer, at just under a minute, or the short trailer, a mere thirty seconds!

blurbs

"Maureen Thorson's narrator addresses a former love (who may as well be us) in a series of beautiful sonnetlike pieces that cohere in a sequence like shards in a mosaic -- some bits darker, some brighter, each tight. "I want to diagram the light that shines out through the holes you pricked in me," she says. "Instead, I retract into extravagant gestures, diaries, bonfires, the psycho gloss of wilted blossoms, dead-eyed stamens stitched in rows." Thorson's Applies to Oranges sings and surprises in both new and timeless ways, as love's decay blooms gorgeously and is borne away by dissipating spiders.-SHANNA COMPTON

"Thorson is an orphaned Victorian trapped in a robot spider who wants badly to sell us madeleines woven of fake hypnotic oranges, but all time has converged in these lines, the astronavigation is cluttered with satellites, her suicidal flower arrangements can't be decoded, the 'signal / fail[s], decay[s] into ornament,' and real grief of lost love and the motion picture clips of it we project onto foreign scenery make us realize that 'the radio plays / different stations, and you have no radio.' The commerce of fictional, degenerating visual language and memory confuses us and comforts us as we, as Thorson, wrestle with its insidious, satisfying infestation of our individual and collective experience. This is wonderful, deeply, and superficially felt work." --CATHY EISENHOWER

"Maureen Thorson's first full-length book is a necessary satellite signal made of a uniquely singular ache and echo. She deftly performs a precise dissection of heartbreak's timeless ability to blow open the universe of our lives and allow our fascinating agonies to burst into being. Applies to Oranges is a collection that is, at once, a mythic tale of loss and a microscopic look into the delicate beauty of broken things. These wonderful poems demand that you linger in their haunting world, and as Thorson says, 'breathe slowly, if at all.'" --ADA LIMON

selections, readings and more:

Poems from Applies to Oranges can be found online at So-and-So, LOCUSPOINT, and Coconut. Poems from the book have also appeared in Barrelhouse, A Handsome Journal, The Hat, Hotel Amerika, Hot Whiskey, listenlight, LIT, Poor Claudia, and String of Small Machines.

To learn about upcoming readings, click here. And if you'd like to invite me to read in your town, please email me at reenhead-AT-gmail-DOT-com!