ERIN GANAWAY’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in The New York Quarterly, Third Coast, The Texas Review, and elsewhere. She was a featured poet in Town Creek Poetry, and her poems were selected for inclusion in Best New Poets, as well as the Georgia volume of The Southern Poetry Anthology. Ganaway holds a Master of Fine Arts from Hollins University. She divides her time between Atlanta and Cape Cod.
Now available in eBook!
The Waiting Girl explores the exterior and interior landscapes as they apply to identity, specifically celebrating the Appalachian South and Cape Cod. The poems in this collection carry readers from the cracked red earth of Georgia to the cobblestone streets of Nantucket. Through these bold environments, Ganaway delves into the nuances of mania and melancholia, illuminating the bittersweet nature of bipolar disorder, and raising awareness of this still largely misunderstood state of being.
Winner of The TRP Southern Poetry Breakthrough Prize: Georgia
“Just as Melville’s Ishmael did when he was ‘growing grim about the mouth,’ with his ‘hypos’ getting out of hand, Erin Ganaway sets sail on an ocean of longing and melancholia and, in the poems of The Waiting Girl, with equally startling and inspiring results. In poems that are remarkable in their honesty, their clarity, and the depth of their feeling, she voyages through lost past, painful present, and fearsome future with the sure knowledge that ‘It is never too late / to regain the place / that means everything.’ What more could we ask?”
—R. H. W. Dillard
“In these precise poems, at once bold and vulnerable, Erin Ganaway takes us to the interior of the constructed, fragmented self of ‘the waiting girl’ through landscapes that envelop, tear, and would toss her out. In the action of tracing lineage and of seeing the sensory details of diverse settings, these poems enact uncertainty that the combinations alive in the speaker will finally make their own whole, and yet we are left with some confidence that this is so: ‘…through the froth / I can follow the sun’s porthole / to a lighter place, / surfacing, piercing through / like the lone survivor.’ The journey of these poems shimmers with wonder, a wonder to behold.”
—Cathryn Hankla
“Erin Ganaway’s The Waiting Girl is one of the freshest poetry collections I have read in a long time. Brimming with dynamic turns of phrase, rich imagery, and sophisticated honesty, Ganaway’s debut collection explores dichotomies of the visible landscapes she inhabits—Appalachian Georgia and Cape Cod, Massachusetts—and the bipolarities of inner, psychological landscapes. A significant new voice in contemporary poetry, Ganaway stuns with both delicacy and subtle violence, poems of raw energy and meticulous craftsmanship. The Waiting Girl reveals a poet of genuine giftedness, one who will endure.”
—William Wright
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