To a New Era by Joanna Fuhrman

Joanna Fuhrman’s new book is a fearless blend of the real and the surreal, the political and the personal, all with the marks of her own kind of accelerated dizzying style that nevertheless brings you along with it. Her work has been published in many journals, in including the Pushcart Prize Anthology (2011). She is the author of five previous full-length poetry collections, four of which have been published by Hanging Loose: Freud in Brooklyn, Ugh Ugh Ocean, Moraine, and The Year of Yellow Butterflies. Her books have been widely reviewed and praised; To a New Era is no exception.

“Joanna Fuhrman is the herald of a new era. An era where we eat more grandma slices but drink fewer papaya drinks. An era where the past wears its dirty underwear to every gala. An era where we all bake cakes shaped like the world we want to become. I welcome that world, that new era, because it will include these poems as proof that the world we wanted was not only possible but already here, and wonderful.”

— Sharon Mesmer

“Joanna Fuhrman’s got her own funky brand of blended surrealism and fabulism going on in To a New Era. The poems in this tour de force offer funicular modes of language transport, making it a dizzying, dazzling joy to be a commuter on this collection (see ‘Adjunct Commuter’ poems). Sentience abounds; metamorphoses are in the poetry’s plasma. Formal poems emit a flirty, contemporary spirit of rebellion. Political poems are pissed, hilarious, iconoclastic, in debate with language’s complicated connotations, histories, and alternate histories. In To a New Era, Fuhrman toasts to the cyclones that blow through our days and our nights. This collection is one storm of words that will bowl you over!”

— Martine Bellen