Queeney, Courtney 1978-

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Queeney, Courtney 1978-

PERSONAL:

Born 1978, in Chicago, IL. Education: Duke University, B.A.; Syracuse University, M.F.A., 2005.

ADDRESSES:

Home—New York, NY. E-mail—courtneyqueeney@hotmail.com.

CAREER:

Poet, 2005—.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Atlantic Monthly student poetry competition third-place award, 2005, for "Ghazal of the Ungotten."

WRITINGS:

(With Sarah C. Harwell and Farah Marklevits) Three New Poets, Sheep Meadow Press (Riverdale-on-Hudson, NY), 2006.

Filibuster to Delay a Kiss and Other Poems, Random House (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor of poetry to periodicals, including American Poetry Review and McSweeney's.

SIDELIGHTS:

Poet Courtney Queeney first came to public attention in 2005, when she placed in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly student poetry competition for "Ghazal of the Ungotten." The competition, which is open to full-time students enrolled in U.S. institutions, accepted over 2,000 submissions and gave "Ghazal of the Ungotten" third place. Queeney's work marked the debut of a new and unexpected talent, according to Syracuse University professor and author Mary Karr, Queeney's thesis advisor, who told Alison Harding, writing for the Daily Orange, that Queeney "is a rare thing. She's a real poet with enormous intelligence…. She is also one of the hardest working students I have ever met." In her article, Harding reveals that Queeney's poetry career did not begin until her junior year in college, when she was inspired by a poetry workshop at Duke University. "‘It opened my eyes. I have never wanted to do anything (else) since,’" Queeney commented.

The poems in Queeney's first solo collection, Filibuster to Delay a Kiss and Other Poems, which was published in 2007, draw on ideas and images closely associated with her personal life and experience. This tendency has led some critics to label her a "confessional poet." A Publishers Weekly reviewer described the poems in Filibuster to Delay a Kiss as "autobiographical poems, sketches of archetypes and pieces about a persona she calls ‘the Anti-Leading Lady,’" and compares Queeney's opus to the works of arch-confessional poets Sylvia Plath and Louise Gluck. "Topically," wrote Kendra Tanacea in the Growler Poetry Review, "her first book covers family (specifically, a mother-daughter relationship), sexuality, and an interrogation of the self as an exploration of multiple public personae. There is often a sense of dislocation and disassociation in the poems, a carving up or splitting between the body and the mind." "This collection is intended to show with candor the coming of age of a young woman," declared Dennis Lythgoe, writing for the Deseret Morning News. "Her poems deal with family, love, joy, suffering—and being a sex object. They reveal a complicated relationship with her mother and a frustration with men." "Although Queeney describes herself as a lyric poet, rejecting the confessional characterization," Tanacea continued, "her poems seem confessional in their intimacy. Still, though, there are an exacting eye and coolness that give the poems perfect balance."