Selected for the 2009 National Poetry Series by Natasha Trethewey
Set in southern New Mexico, where her family's multicultural history is deeply rooted, the poems in Carrie Fountain's first collection explore issues of progress, history, violence, sexuality, and the self. Burn Lake weaves together the experience of life in the rapidly changing American Southwest with the peculiar journey of Don Juan de Onate, who was dispatched from Mexico City in the late sixteenth- century by Spanish royalty to settle the so-called New Mexico Province, of which little was known. A...

A moving, authentic exploration of spirituality and the domestic from a prize-winning poet
The wry, supple poems in Carrie Fountain s second collection take the form of prayers and meditations chronicling the existential shifts brought on by parenthood, spiritual searching, and the profound, often beguiling experience of being a self, inside a body, with a soul. Fountain s voice is at once deep and loose, enacting the dawning of spiritual insight, but without leaving the daily world, matching the feeling of the pure holiness in motherhood with the thuds the giant dumpsters make...