Tramp
Using newspaper accounts and court records from the late
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Joelle Biele’s poems tell the
personal stories of women who left their homes and families to tramp the
roads and rails. Driven by poverty, abuse, or a desire for a better
life, these women often encountered misery and danger in their quest for
freedom, as interviews and printed records attest. In Tramp, Biele
weaves these real-life stories into poignant and insightful verse that
gives us a window into previously unexplored lives.
Praise
Biele’s Tramp is well worth the read, an
important and thoughtful collection of imagined histories that one is
tempted to pick up and put down—and pick up again and again and again.
—Virginia Marshall, Harvard Review
With daring and
panache, Joelle Biele pulls us onto the boxcars occupied by early
twentieth century “tramps,” and we experience their adventures and
dangers, their alternative histories, existing outside the conventional
narrative. Biele is as dexterous and wily as the women she recovers
and inhabits. She draws on newspaper accounts and postcards and
courtroom transcripts and glossaries, alive to the textures of these
documents threading through the lyric. What a rush it is to occupy, for
a time, a life like “a horse too wild to ride,” to gaze from an
accelerating train at “a silo that dreams of nothing but thunder and
grain.” What a magnificent journey. —Beth Ann Fennelly
Now that
I’ve read Tramp, I know more about this world and those who dwell in it,
and I am grateful to these poems of praise and lament for what they
reveal. With attention to craft and voice, research, and beauty, Joelle
Biele writes a world that is at once entirely new and fundamentally
true. Thanks to Tramp, my heart and my mind are more open,
more full.—Camille Dungy
Tramp is documentary poetics at its finest. These
unforgettable characters, women who rode the rails, their stories by
turns astonishing and heartbreaking, make this a book a reader will
devour in a single sitting. —Jacqueline Osherow
Biography
Joelle Biele is the author of White Summer
and
Broom
and the editor of Elizabeth Bishop and The New Yorker: The
Complete Correspondence. A Fulbright professor in Germany and
Poland, she has received awards from the Maryland State Arts Council and
the Poetry Society of America. Her essays and fiction appear in
American Poetry Review, Antioch Review, Black Warrior
Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, and
New England Review. She has taught American literature and creative writing at
Johns Hopkins University, the University of Maryland, Goucher College, the University of
Oldenburg, Germany, and Jagiellonian University, Poland.
She will be the 2017-2018 Howard County Poetry and Literature Society
Writer-in-Residence.