Finalist for the Poetry Society of America’s 2005 Norma Farber First Book Award. Bright Turquoise Umbrella follows a child into young womanhood through a shifting magical landscape of portents and signs. Here, as in Garcia Marquez' Macondo, violence has disrupted the linear world, replacing it with one ruled by dream logic, where a fish makes prophecies, beheaded women sing, and time and the world's boundaries are indeterminate.

"In these lucid dreams of revelation, Hermine Meinhard takes as her starting point the most mysterious territory of the soul. Amazed and hurt, joking in fear, loving and experienced, all at once, she is one of those few artists (Kafka and Fra Angelico come to mind) whose simplicity and skill deliver the refreshment of a deeper tenderness toward being."
—Brooks Haxton

"In Hermine Meinhard's poems, everything is, as the French poet Robert Desnos once said, 'as if in a child's picture.' Naive and wise at the same time, and also terrible and disturbing. They are delicate necklaces of gestures, imaginative spaces where bodies and fables get grafted onto and grow into each other. I love the gentle waywardness of Meinhard's storytelling, her habitual methodology 'agitating and seeking' to find the self."
—Elaine Equi

"Meinhard's receptive devotion to dreams and folktales of earth, sky, animals and insects, places her among the most gifted portraitists of our time. In four distinct chapters, Oscar Wilde's 'life is too important to be taken seriously,' whispers through a lullaby that falls, singing reversals and contradictions, 'from the Tree of Heaven.'"
—Andrew Levy

Reviews:
ChicagoPostModernPoetry.com
Margin: Exploring Magical Realism
Jacket
Rain Taxi

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