Exuberance

Take flight with these dazzling persona poems telling the stories of daredevil pilots in the early days of aviationfrom the author of American Yard. Daredevil pilots Lincoln Beachey, Betty Scott, Harriet Quimby, Ruth Law, Ormer Locklear, Bessie Coleman, and Clyde Pangborn fly at carnival altitudes to thrill millions of spectators who have never seen an airplane. In a lyrical sequence of persona poems, the pilots in Exuberance wonder how the experience of moving through the air will transform life on the ground. They learn to name the clouds, size up the winds, mix an Aviation Cocktail, perform a strange field landing, and make an emergency jump."Intoxicated with the history of aviation, Dolores Hayden has written a work of historical imagination that is vocally energetic, psychologically acute, and musically sophisticated. . . . The movement between lyrical speech and historical reflection gives us not only a portrait of the early...