Rue
Kathryn Nuernberger's third poetry collection infuses fact and folklore with a fiercely feminist ecopoetic soul to reclaim love and resilience in an age of cruelty. As she continues to explore scientific thought through a poetic lens, Nuernberger turns her gaze to the science and folklore surrounding plants historically used for birth control. As the speaker, an artist and intellectual, finds herself living through a rocky marriage in conservative rural America, she turns to the hardiest plants around her to survive. Her ethnobotanical portraits of common herbs like Queen Anne's lace and pennyroyal are interwoven with lyric biographies of pioneering women ecologists. With a skeptical eye to the stories left untold in textbooks and an unflinching account of patriarchal abuse during an OBGYN exam, Nuernberger scrutinizes the sanctioned history of medicine and marriage. With equal parts righteous fury and tender wisdom, Rue reclaims the past and recontextualizes the present to tell a story about breaking down, breaking through, and breaking into an honest, authentic expression of self.
Kathryn Nuernberger is the author of two previous poetry collections, The End of Pink and Rag & Bone. She has also written a collection of lyric essays, Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past. Fascinated by the history of science and the natural world, she has received research fellowships from the H. J. Andrews Research Forest, American Antiquarian Society and the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life. Other awards include an NEA fellowship and the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets. Her poems and essays have appeared widely in journals, including 32 Poems, Cincinnati Review, Copper Nickel, Crazyhorse, Field, The Florida Review, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, Poetry International, West Branch, Willow Springs, Poetry Daily, and Verse Daily. She holds a PhD in English Literature from Ohio University and an MFA in Creative Writing from Eastern Washington University. After spending many years directing Pleiades Press, she now teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Minnesota and lives with her family in Minneapolis-St. Paul, MN.
