Waking Stone

From Carole Simmons Oles comes a new modern poetry biography, this one based on the life of American sculptor Harriet Hosmer (18301908). After an exceptional apprenticeship in Rome, Hosmer opened a studio there where she was associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and the Brownings. Though some of her work survives today, much of it has disappeared. Oles rediscovers Hosmer s life in Waking Stone. This is a dialogue, an exploration of what Oles calls their parallel universes. In beautiful and affecting lyric and narrative poems, some in Hosmer s voice, some in her own, Oles bends time and circumstances to reveal the essential kinship between two women artists. Oles keeps readers moving through Hosmer s story, with its flashes of delight, anger, mischief, and triumph, as well as through Oles s life and time, speaking imaginatively to young women about cutting themselves with razor blades, and to older women about suffering disfiguring treatments for breast cancer. "