REQUIEM: A PATRIMONY OF FUGUES by Tina Schumann

Tina Schumann is the award-winning author of four poetry collections, most recently Boneyard Heresies, winner of the 2023 Moon City Press Poetry Award (Missouri State University); Praising the Paradox (Red Hen Press, 2019) a finalist in the National Poetry Series, Four Way Books Intro Prize, the New Issues Poetry Prize and the Julie Suk Award among others; Requiem. A Patrimony of Fugues (Diode Editions, 2017) winner of the Diode Editions Chapbook Competition and As If (Parlor City Press, 2010) winner of the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She is the editor of the IPPY award-winning anthology Two Countries. U.S. Daughters and Sons of Immigrant Parents (Red Hen, 2017) Schumann’s work received the American Poet Prize from The American Poetry Journal, runner-up status in the 2023 annual Jeffrey E. Smith Editors' Prize from The Missouri Review and finalist status in the 2013 Terrain.org annual poetry contest. Her work has received honorable mentions in The Atlantic, Crab Creek Review, and The Allen Ginsberg Editors' Choice Award. She serves as a poetry editor with Wandering Aengus Press and is a graduate of the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her poems have appeared in publications and anthologies since 1999, including The American Journal of Poetry, Ascent, Bear Review, Catamaran Literary Reader, Cimarron Review, Diode, Hunger Mountain Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Parabola, Palabra, Paterson Literary Review, Poetry Daily. Rattle, Southern Humanities Review, Verse Daily, and read on NPR's The Writer's Almanac.

Few poets make ideas as tactile as Tina Schumann. At once readily accessible and piercingly ambiguous, Requiem: A Patrimony of Fugues presents both the heartbreak and the epiphanies involved in caring for a beloved parent who is gradually fading into self-eradicating dementia. Each deeply elegiac poem stands on its own while serving as yet one more critical juncture in this most remarkable sequence. The volume astonishes not simply because of its consistently remarkable phrasing or its myriad musical nuances, but because of the inventive line-by-line composing and the manifold interpretative possibilities on every page. Schumann’s achievement is that the brilliant verse rendering of her ministrations calls us back to her daughterly devotion over and over.

—Kevin Clark, author of Self-Portrait with Expletives, winner of the Lena-Miles Wever Todd Poetry Series Book Competition

“It’s a rare poet whose words plumb the depths of our lives with the resonant complexity of music; it’s an ambitious poet who attempts this. In Requiem. Patrimony of Fugues, Tina Schumann honestly and fearlessly explores what it means to lose a father to dementia. From the opening “Overture (anticipation)” through the final “Long Distance Dirge,” Schumann shuttles back and forth in time, reweaving her father and their complex relationship in memory as he frays. Despair is here, but so is redemption: “what he taught me with intention—that I could bear my own weight, /that I was stronger than I knew.” Every difficult note rings true; every poem will break open your heart, reminding us of our shared, fragile humanity.” 

​—Holly J. Hughes, editor of Beyond Forgetting: Poetry & Prose about Alzheimer’s Disease (Kent State University Press)

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