To A New Era

Joanna Fuhrman's sixth poetry collection is a fearless blend of the real and the surreal, the political and the personal, all with the marks of her own kind of accelerated dizzying style that nevertheless brings you along with it. "Fuhrman's got her own funky brand of blended surrealism and fabulism going on in To a New Era. The poems in this tour de force offer funicular modes of language transport, making it a dizzying, dazzling joy to be a commuter on this collection (see 'Adjunct Commuter' poems). Sentience abounds; metamorphoses are in the poetry's plasma. Formal poems emit a flirty, contemporary spirit of rebellion. Political poems are pissed, hilarious, iconoclastic, in debate with language's complicated connotations, histories, and alternate histories. In To a New Era, Fuhrman toasts to the cyclones that blow through our days and our nights. This collection is one storm of words that will bowl you over! " -Martine Bellen   Joanna Fuhrman's work has been published in many journals, in including the Pushcart Prize Anthology (2011). She writes essays on teaching poetry to young people, and she is the author of six previous full-length poetry collections, five of which have been published by Hanging Loose: FREUD IN BROOKLYN (2000), UGH UGH OCEAN (2003), MORAINE (2006), THE YEAR OF THE YELLOW BUTTERFLIES (2015), and TO A NEW ERA (2021). A past winner of the Kenereth Gensler Award, her books have been widely reviewed and praised.   "Joanna Fuhrman is the herald of a new era. An era where we eat more grandma slices but drink fewer papaya drinks. An era where the past wears its dirty underwear to every gala. An era where we all bake cakes shaped like the world we want to become. I welcome that world, that new era, because it will include these poems as proof that the world we wanted was not only possible but already here, and wonderful." - Sharon Mesmer "These poems speak from, of, and ahead of our times. They are the sound of our era's political unconscious—what Fuhrman calls the 'Tootsie Pop Mermaid of History.' This work is trying to wake us up and stir us to action even as 'Every year, our belief in the future is more defunded.' Fuhrman's method is radically original. Rather than speaking above our commodified Pop Art present, she embraces it, turning its tools against itself – 'My tweet/ is a bullet/ headed/ straight/ into the heart/ of Capitalism,/ who is wearing/ a frayed/ Cookie Monster/ costume.' This writing is resilient and exhilarating, showing swagger in the face of daunting odds. Read it for an infusion of satire, wit, and defiance as you grapple with our current version of everyday life." - Elaine Equi