Uncertain Grace

Rebecca Wee

In this moody and political debut, Rebecca Wee creates a lyrical mosaic from fragments of memory and imagination, taking Ezra Pound’s advice to heart: “The natural object is always the adequate symbol.” As line after line gathers detail from the world, her poems build in momentum and present multiple and simultaneous points of reality. In her final poem she offers this insight into experience: “desire and stupor. history. this. / tracks through the snow, leading out.”

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ISBN: 9781556591549

Format: Paperback

Pont des Arts

She’s bent in a posture of anguish or prayer
in a spot of city filth.

Head down, a stained knit cap
with a few coins on the ground beside her,
and her pliant child, a shadow.

Someone veers past with a friend
in a clamor of rings and scarves. A pretty child
skips after them, scattering pigeons.

The mothers miss how their daughters’ eyes catch then—
the wary, openmouthed stares.

A terrible knowledge passes between them,
the bridge rippling under their feet

before the polished child rushes past but looks back
at the one on the bridge in the heat—

the sunblown silent one
whose hand has pulled back and flown up to smooth,
for a moment, her heavy hair.

About the Author

Rebecca Wee is a professor of creative writing at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. She earned her MFA from George Mason University and has received The Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets, a Witter Bynner fellowship from the Library of Congress, a Minnesota State Arts Board grant, and other honors. She served as an editorial assistant to Carolyn Forché on her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, and was the third Poet Laureate of the …

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Reviews

“Crystalline imagery and an elegiac mood characterize the poems in Rebecca Wee’s Uncertain Grace, and the conjunction of these elements provides an intriguing and necessary tension in her work.” —American Book Review

“These poems are passionate and sincere, and the voice is heightened until it is sensual and musical. These are emotional poems—each briskly draws our attention to reality and takes us on an arduous journey, after which, my guess is readers will be thoughtful, and for different reasons, so rich are the poems in their consequences.” —Jane Miller, judge’s citation for the Hayden Carruth Award, 2000