FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

“Colette LaBouff Atkinson’s artful laconicism attains the force of a shout, without ever raising its voice. The intelligent, merciless narrative cool arrays a sad comedy, with an unemphatic but penetrating ‘and then … and then’: accounts of love pursued far more often than it is glimpsed or realized.”
Robert Pinsky

“Atkinson has taken charge of her personal history, mapped it out across the rough sides of suburban coastal southern California where she drives to the Pacific to be without force, and to be revealed. Mixing popular movies, songs, and arcade games with thoughts on Milton, Augustine, and Herodotus, and with sympathy for the misunderstood crow and turkey vulture, Mean cracks a whip that cracks back on itself—aware at each step that what is given up, in kindness or cruelty, is never balanced by the reward.”
Killarney Clary

Mean
Colette LaBouff Atkinson

In the appropriately titled Mean, Colette LaBouff Atkinson’s speakers confront a series of cruel lovers, estranged ex-husbands and ex-ex-wives, neglectful parents, disrespectful children, menacing drunks, would-be rapists, well-meaning but ineffectual teachers, and that annoying kid in first grade who wouldn’t leave you alone. Managing to “say” what most of us would only think but never dare speak out loud, this stunning debut collection reveals that the horrors and cruelty we experience in everyday life can turn out to be very real indeed. But Atkinson does not merely rake her subjects across the coals: she deftly exposes, instead, how the world mirrors back to us our own meanness, lending it a truth and a history. In forty-three deadpan, often merciless prose poems that are masterpieces of the form, Mean lays bare the darkness within the narrator’s heart as well as in ours.

Colette LaBouff Atkinson is associate director of the International Center for Writing and Translation at the University of California, Irvine.

 

Colette LaBouff Atkinson is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Lindsay Dawson at (773) 702-1964 or ldawson@press.uchicago.edu

---

The University of Chicago Press • 1427 East 60th Street • Chicago, IL 60637 USA