The Alphabet of Desire [Hardcover]

Barbara Hamby (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 1, 1999

In this sublime and imposing book of poetry, Barbara Hamby races through the circuitous regions of Heaven and Hell, desire and love, giving shape and significance to the strange and the familiar. Her book ignites with a proclamation, "In the beginning was the word, fanning out into syllables, like a deck of cards on a table in Vegas, lovely leafy parts fluttering into atoms and cells, genus and phylum, nouns and verbs;" an easy metaphor for her intoxicating linguistic machinations.

Hamby's roaming, inquisitive mind reels in the reader, "I'm persuaded the day will come when I'll lie static as a falcon in a hunter's sack, fragments of iron studding my reckless breast." Not limited to the self-referential, Hamby playfully references historic and literary personae, taking stabs at Shakespeare, Jane Austen, the Bible and Casanova. "Who wouldn't," she challenges us, "give anything for the voice of an angel and wings to fly above the rough dirt of birth?"

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Hambly's first collection, Delirium (Univ. of North Texas, 1995), won the 1994 Vassar Miller prize, the 1996 Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Norma Farber First Book Award, and it's no surprise that this second collection has garnered yet another prize: the 1999 NYU Press Prize for Poetry. Hambly's honest, colloquial language engenders trust in her depiction of an abstract, intercontinental, contemporary world. Lusty, unself-conscious, musical, and fresh, these poems are about the "undetonated chaos packed tight inside everyone" as we absorb the information daily cast down on us from satellites overhead. Hambly's reference range from Louis Malle to Daffy Duck, and she incorporates satire and wit into a sprawling body of poems that sing. Highly recommended.AAnn K. van Buren, New York
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Hamby's poems are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive. She roars around the parabola of the time-space continuum, leaping between the past, both ancient and within memory, and the present, then circles the globe all within a single high-octane couplet. Hamby strings words and worlds together with the gravity-defying momentum of a high-flying dancer or a whirling dervish, traveling to Italy, India, St. Louis, the Amazon, Santa Fe, and Hawaii in long, zestful exhalations. She rumbas and stomps and shakes her finger in your face as she writes of war and sex, love and hunger, insomnia, drunkenness, the movies, family, the soul, art, and the devil. Her commentary is hilarious. The sudden moments of stillness found unexpectedly within the rush of her rants are radiant and spellbinding, and the clash between her velocity and her specificity creates a sizzling current of electricity that runs through every dashing, piquant, and diva-sung line. Donna Seaman

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 144 pages
• Publisher: NYU Press (May 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0814735975
• ISBN-13: 978-0814735978
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.6 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,319,047 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Tropical Word Sea, December 17, 1999

By 

Carol (Columbus, Ohio) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Alphabet of Desire (Paperback)

Reading this collection of poems, I felt like a mermaid swimming in a tropical word sea. I particularly resonated with "Kamehameha Drive-In, 25 Years Later"...perhaps because I have been there and was able to revisit this landmark of Hawai'ian adolescence through Hamby's songful imagery. "Footbinding as a Way of Life"--the title alone should make thoughtful people pause and regard in wonderment. The surprises and delights in Hamby's wordcrafting had my lover going "Wow!" when I did an oral reading of poems in this collection.