Happiness

Poetry by Deborah Keenen

May 1, 1995 • 6 x 9 • 96 pages • 978-1-56689-033-5

“A very satisfying cumulative beauty. . . . These are, simply, poems about love (while not exactly love poems) and the many forms it takes. They are finally not about happiness. Best of all, they are smart enough to know the difference.” —The Nation

About the Author

Deborah Keenan teaches for the Creative Writing Programs at Hamline University, The Loft, and privately. She is the author of Household Wounds, One Angel Then, How We Missed Belgium (in collaboration with Jim Moore), The Only Window That Counts, Happiness, Good Heart, Kingdoms, Willow Room, Green Door: New and Selected Poems (recipient of the Minnesota Book Award), From Tiger to Prayer, and is completing a collaborative collection of poems and paintings for Red Bird Chapbooks, due out in November, 2013. She co-edited Looking For Home: Women Writing About Exile, an anthology which received an American Book Award in 1991.

Reviews

“These poems are quick-witted, tender, and generous, and they are so truthful to the passionate trials of familial lives that they seems eerie—they are that accurate.” —Charles Baxter, author of Shadow Play

“Happiness is a theater of unmaskings. This poet faces history by telling the truth about love and rage, grief and recovery, letting go and going on. By dint of scrupulous perception, and regard, Deborah Keenan re-visions the miracle of ordinary life until the past becomes a dialogue she holds with mother language and us.” —Carol Conroy, author of The Beauty Wars

“Here are poems written with an intense and urgent matter-of-factness that’s nothing short of miraculous, like flying in dreams, where how we got there is a mystery, yet there we are, soaring.” —Jim Krusoe, editor of The Santa Monica Review

“A poet who has the courage and honesty to write equally of love and its betrayals, forces which are so often—perhaps always—at the heart of the stories that matter most to us. . . . What we are given is a very large history, the history of the human heart as it tries to find a home for itself in this country, at the end of this century.” —Jim Moore, author of The Long Experience of Love

“A very satisfying cumulative beauty. . . . These are, simply, poems about love (while not exactly love poems) and the many forms it takes. They are finally not about happiness. Best of all, they are smart enough to know the difference.” —The Nation