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.