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Circassian Girl Michelle Mitchell-Foust 0-9709342-2-X $13.00 ©2001 order this title       Michelle Mitchell-Foust lives in Dana Point, California, and teaches at Irvine Valley College. She received her B.A. in English from Eastern Illinois University, and earned her Master's degree and Doctorate in English from the University of Missouri-Columbia. Her work has appeared in The Nation, Colorado Review, The Denver Quarterly, Columbia Magazine of Literature and Art, American Literary Review, Quarterly West, and The Academy of American Poets New Voices Anthology, among other small magazines and anthologies.       In Circassian Girl, Michelle Mitchell-Foust avows just how it is that miracles shelter in mishap, that enormity makes its home among the small and in small syllables. Here is a beautifully sustained advocacy of tender perils, a high-wire act of perfect words. These poems dazzle me. —Donald Revell     From the Foreword: This is a book abounding in evocations (often subtle and indirect, yet always energetic) of museums, galleries, stages—all such bounded areas within which events are given leave to be. —Bin Ramke	Circassian Girl catalogs the lives and feats of circus players in the 19th and 20th centuries. It is indeed the ancient dialog between the body and spirit that these poems engage so brilliantly, and the ways in which the daring acts of the circus players give body to all human wishes for the miraculous. Michelle Mitchell-Foust is a daring poet, the photographic melee here as beautiful and grotesque—as honest—in its portrayals as Diane Arbus's photography. It takes a poet of fierce intelligence and consummate skill to make the arguments of the spirit manifest, and Michelle Mitchell-Foust has managed to do so magnificently here. Read it! —Claudia Keelan
from Circassian Girl
The New Circus Working Act Murderers are easy to understand, he said, and in one fell swoop Musil pulled them down from their stages and waylaid them onto the cold floor. They're no sword swallowers, no fire eaters, and so many live near this sea, some in plain sight of it, and bury their pain head first, with its toes out of the ground, wiggling like a child's at the beach, or they take the struggling young actress, the Black Dahlia, and sever their throb in two halves of a woman, a clean bite jagged as a shark's. Combers find another woman all the time. Yesterday, a man thought the body was a life-guard joke, a blow-up doll, and took hold of her to find her heavy and real, and his buddy wouldn't come within a few feet of his pulling her out. On the news, his face was odd, somewhere between a laugh and a grimace, an expression canceling itself out the way today's storm clouds canceled the light over certain houses, certain places on the mountain and not others, a handful of soft curses forging other figures in the landscape into gold.