New Releases by Meg Kearney

Trooper, a three-legged dog, remembers his life as a stray, before he was adopted.

The acclaimed story of an adopted teenager''s quest to find her place among family, friends, and the wider world. Being adopted is a fact of life in the McLane household: fourteen-year old Lizzie, as well as her older brother and sister were adopted as infants. But facts are not feelings, and what it feels like to be adopted is something Lizzie never dares discuss with her loving parents, let alone with outsiders. Lizzie yearns to confide in others, especially her friend, Peter. Yet something stops her. Will Peter think she is less because her birthmother gave her away? Would telling be disloyal to her adoptive parents? To make sense of her life, Lizzie pours her emotions into her poetry--list poems, sonnets, free verse, sestinas, blues--about her family, best friends, basketball, the dance. Then a tragic accident occurs, and Lizzie knows she must find the courage to speak. In an afterword, the author discusses her own adoption and the beneficial powers of reading and writing poetry. Also included are a guide to the book''s poetics and recommended books and links about adoption and poetry.

In An Unkindness of Ravens, Meg Kearney''s poems weave voices of estrangement and redemption: mothers, daughters, lovers of gin and dead things. In the middle poems, the protagonist confronts "Raven": a figure of guises and disguises, revealing the speaker''s fears and angst. National Book Critics Circle Award-winning poet Donald Hall has written the Foreword. Meg Kearney is the Associate Director of the National Book Foundation. She was the recipient of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and New York Times fellowships and received the Alice M. Sellers Academy of American Poets Prize in 1998. She lives in New York City.