Winner of the 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
"You will love Dorsey Craft's rollicking persona, Pirate Anne Bonny, who, in this thrilling book of poems, serves up heaps of scintillant treasures from the bottomless trunk of her imagination, wit, and verve. In Plunder, Jack Sparrow has met his match."
-Deb Gorlin, judge, 2019 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize
Dorsey Craft is the author of the chapbook The Pirate Anne Bonny Dances the Tarantella, forthcoming from Cutbank in 2020. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Crab Orchard Review, Greensboro Review, Massachusetts Review, Ninth Letter, Passages North, Poetry Daily, Southern Indiana Review, Thrush Poetry Journal and elsewhere. She holds an MFA in poetry from McNeese State University and a BA in English from Clemson University, and is currently a PhD candidate in poetry at Florida State University. She is also a Poetry Editor for The Southeast Review.
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[So you think you've dipped your toe / in the icy clatter of my diamond? (THE PIRATE ANNE BONNY SAYS SHE'S NOT THE MADWOMAN IN THE ATTIC)***
(@BauhanPub, 30 December 2020, e-book, 128 pages, #ARC from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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I'd never heard of the poet before but the cover, title and concept intrigued me and I was curious to see where the poet went. I don't think I've ever read a collection of poems created using a persona before and the poems I tend to enjoy are very personal or autobiographical. I had such fun reading this collection. It's not like any collection of poems I've read before. Not every poem features Anne Bonny and some poems are what I'd class as more standard modern poems. Anne Bonny's poems were the most enjoyable, fun, dazzling and original. The best poems are The Pirate Anne Bonny Dances the Tarantella, The Pirate Anne Bonny Advises Jane Eyre, Memos for My Mother, Ode to Sex and the City (one of the best poems ever), Hernia and My Father the Shark. I look forward to seeing what the poet comes up with next.
