Animals
Alice Mattison
"Mattison has written the
best poems I know about the 'Bodiliness,' the sheer physicality of pregnancy and
motherhood. The poems are about much more than this; but they start from here. There is a
wonderful ebullience and bravado, intelligence and freshness about her book. I hope
everyone reads it."
—Frank Bidart
"Poems by Alice Mattison...wind up being superb poems about 'being a woman' because they are so unsparingly and un-selfpityingly about the perceptions and feelings of Alice Mattison."
—Richard Dyer, The Boston Globe
about the author
Alice Mattison’s fourth novel, The Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman, was published by William Morrow in August, 2004. Her previous novels are The Book Borrower (William Morrow, 1999), which was a New York Times Notable Book; Hilda and Pearl (Morrow, 1995), and Field of Stars (Morrow, 1992). Her collection of intersecting stories, Men Giving Money, Women Yelling (Morrow, 1997), was a NY Times Notable Book of 1997. She is the author of two earlier collections of stories, Great Wits (Morrow, 1988) and The Flight Of Andy Burns (Morrow, 1993), and a collection of poems, Animals (Alice James Books, 1980). She is co-editor of As I Sat On the Green: Living Without a Home in New Haven, which was published by Columbus House, New Haven in the fall of 2000.
A short story, "In Case We’re Separated" appeared in Best American Short Stories 2002. Stories and poems have been published in The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Michigan Quarterly Review, Glimmer Train, North American Review, Boulevard, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. Mattison’s essays have been published or are forthcoming in Writer’s Chronicle, Agni, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Chronicle Of Higher Education, The Threepenny Review, and Southwest Review and anthologized in Pushcart Prize XXIV. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut and teaches fiction in the graduate writing program at Bennington College in Vermont. She is completing a collection of connected stories, Brooklyn Sestina.
