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Stars Burn Regardless / Jean O'Brien

Stars Burn Regardless

By: Jean O'Brien

€12.00
In Stars Burn Regardless,  Jean O’Brien writes as a seer, with a vision that travels beneath and through the worlds she inhabits. With stunning language and original voice, she travels the edges of things: the earth/sea/sky—the bones/bodies/ash. These relentless poems, sometimes liquid, sometimes standing straight up on hard ground, shift into the unfathomable and unspeakable as they name the murders of up to eight ...
ISBN 978-1-915022-05-9
Pub Date Thursday, February 24, 2022
Page Count 80
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In Stars Burn Regardless,  Jean O’Brien writes as a seer, with a vision that travels beneath and through the worlds she inhabits. With stunning language and original voice, she travels the edges of things: the earth/sea/sky—the bones/bodies/ash. These relentless poems, sometimes liquid, sometimes standing straight up on hard ground, shift into the unfathomable and unspeakable as they name the murders of up to eight hundred children’s bodies at the Mother & Babies home in Tuam: Ragged bundles of stick bones tiny as dolls and skulls/the size of tennis balls…O’Brien is a writer who writes the threshold, and then opens the door to shifting transformations of the body and its place on the planet, never backing down from the fevers and the ecstasies. 

Jan Beatty  The Body Wars, University of Pittsburgh Press



These poems rise to their occasion, they are tough, tender, generous, passionate and deeply engaged — I cannot recommend Stars Burn Regardless highly enough.
Mark Roper Poet and Librettist

Jean O'Brien

Jean O’Brien was born in Dublin where she now lives after an eight year sojourn in the Irish Midlands where she was Writer-in-Residence. She has four previous collections to her name; The Shadow Keeper (1997), Dangerous Dresses (2005), Lovely Legs (2009) and Merman (2012).  Her Awards include the Arvon International Poetry Award, and the Fish International Poetry Award. Her work has been placed and highly commended in a number of other competitions including the Forward Prize. She holds an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin and tutors in Creative Writing.

Hotter Stars Burn Blue
(from a line by Rebecca Elson Astronomer/poet)

Whether you know it or not,
we are all eating stars
one way or another.

every morning as we lift
the bedroom blind and let the light in
we banish the dark.

Stars are born and die, like us they burn out.
Supernova shards get stuck in our gut,
we constantly eat their dust

they light us from within, reddening as we age
Death is the only cure for life,
darkness to light and darkness again;

then we cluster in galaxies, we will
never reach in our lifetimes.
Infinity is just a long, long, long line forever 
lusting after shine.

Copyright © Jean O’Brien 2022


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