Ten Thousand Cicadas Can’t Be Wrong
A book of poetry by Maureen Ryan Griffin
ISBN: 978-1-59948-504-1, 130 pages
$15 (plus tax and shipping)

Click the button below to purchase Ten Thousand Cicadas Can’t Be Wrong.

To order by check, send your name and mailing address, along with a check for $20.08 made out to WordPlay, to: WordPlay / 6420 A-1 Rea Road, Suite 218 / Charlotte, NC 28277. Let us know if you’d like your book(s) autographed and/or to have a personal inscription (include name of book’s recipient).

 

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT
TEN THOUSAND CICADAS CAN’T BE WRONG

A literal chorus emanates from Ten Thousand Cicadas Can’t Be Wrong, Maureen Ryan Griffin’s New and Selected Poems, in language that is wonderfully, compulsively precise. Griffin inspects and catalogues the grand and the infinitesimal as through a jeweler’s loupe – parsing, quantifying, enumerating and especially illuminating. There’s not a jot of tedium involved in the tally – for the poet or for the reader – but rather a joy born of the sheer expanse of the world Griffin claims not merely for herself, but returns to us transformed. This is a magnanimous, glowing volume.

~ Joseph Bathanti, former North Carolina Poet Laureate

Ten Thousand Cicadas Can’t Be Wrong—Maureen Ryan Griffin’s collection of new and selected poems—opens with cicadas, and those cicadas keep singing throughout the book. These exuberant poems find holiness in what we may overlook or refuse to think about too deeply—aging and dying, yes; but also pokeweed, dandelions, stinkbugs, crickets, oak gall, acorns, the first wild strawberry, a mother ironing—all those ten thousand things that make up “the messy, glorious/ noise that is life.”

         ~ Becky Gould Gibson, author of Heading Home (Winner of the 2013 Lena Shull Book Contest)

A lover of the seasons, Maureen Ryan Griffin hunts for all things falling—acorns, the childhood sky, the people we love. Yet nature for her brims with promise, agreeing as she does with Rilke that “everything that happens keeps on being a beginning.” Her cicadas long buried beneath the earth inevitably emerge, shed their exoskeletons, and sing.

     ~  Janice Moore Fuller, poet, playwright, professor; winner of the 2008 Oscar Arnold Young Award (North Carolina poetry book of the year)