Jonis Agee for The River Wife from Random House"The River Wife by Jonis Agee grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, shook me and did not release me until the last page. I was appalled by the viciousness of the central character, Jacques Ducharme who ruthlessly amassed a fortune by robbing and murdering passengers of river boats, but I came to care deeply about his fate. The home Jacques Ducharme built at the bend in the river with its lush landscape filled with menace and with longing was not a place for the soft hearted or soft minded. Showing how brutality and tenderness can coexist, Agee unfolds a mesmerizing sequence of characters like Annie Lark who forms a relationship with John James Audubon and Omah the freed slave who became Jacques’s partner in the river raids. While I did take pleasure in the precision of Agee’s language and the natural dialogue, words receded and it was the generations of family passion and despair shadowed by the brutal legacy of Jacques Ducharme that came to haunt me. Unflinching, refusing to gaze over the past, Agee ultimately shows how violence, inexorable as the current of the river, that permeates the novel, cannot be kept at bay and continues to taint the present."
Vivian Shipley is the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor and the editor of Connecticut Review from Southern Connecticut State University. She has published five chapbooks and her seventh book of poems, Hardboot: Poems New & Old, (Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2005) won the 2006 Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and the 2006 Connecticut Press Club Prize for Best Creative Writing. She won the 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award for service to the Literary Community from the Library of Congress Connecticut Center for the Book and the 2005 SCSU Faculty Scholar Award. Gleanings: Old Poems, New Poems (Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2003) won the Paterson Prize for Sustained Literary Achievement and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. When There is No Shore, also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, won the 2003 Connecticut Book Award for Poetry from the Library of Congress’ Center for the Book and the 2002 Word Press Poetry Prize. In 2007, she was inducted into the University of Kentucky Distinguished Alumni Hall of Fame, won the Hackney Literary Award for Poetry from Birmingham-Southern University in Alabama and the New Millennium Poetry Prize. A new book of poetry, All of Your Messages Have Been Erased, is forthcoming in 2009 from Southeastern Louisiana University Press.
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