The Book of Jobs: Poems [Paperback]

Kathryn Maris (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 30, 2006

Kathryn Maris tracks the occupations and preoccupations of a young speaker from post-collegiate funk and despair through a variety of identity-crushing and identity-configuring encounters. Motherhood, employment, urban threats and pleasures, illness and wellness, and the making and the observing of art contribute to her quest for an answer to the question, "What do you do?" Her heart is ever in evidence in these carefully hewn, emotionally bracing lyric poems.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Maris' agreeable, if at times insubstantial, first outing explores not suffering (as in the Biblical Job) but occupations: vocations, professions, trades, ways to work for a living, and the nature of works of art. Her verbal flourishes fit the topic well: "What is work anyway," she asks, "but a turgid mirror// whose revelations quiver/ in recalculation?" Maris' roster of roles includes locksmiths and bankers, opera singers and beggars, Greek Orthodox priests and George Stephanopolous, a "Boiler Repairman" who frightens the author despite his best intentions, "the woman in a ticket booth/ who lives in my left ventricle," a "Professor of Sadness," and an admirable "Veronese waiter/ on a cruise ship," "his art: the art of perceiving want/ even before its germination." Her urbane language keeps its center in Manhattan, with side trips to the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Brazil: the poet also depicts museums and the family home, where she becomes "mother to all that is bare, all that is gone," and (less dramatically) as the mother of a young son. Witty at best, flighty at worst, Maris' verse has the feel of charcoal sketches, well-defined and rapidly executed, with blank space where the perceiver's eye can take hold.
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Review

Kathryn Maris's title, The Book of Jobs, refers not to afflicted heroes of the Hebrew Bible, nor to Apple's Steve, but simply to occupations: The "book of jobs" at a university career center that a liberal arts major might consult when she is, as Maris writes, "unemployed in a world of employment." Or, at least, might've consulted until recently, before the multicolored flyers and faxed announcements all moved online. And if today's students might be amused at the quaintness of Maris's image, well, her poems don't primarily address them. Instead, they address the putatively more adult problem of waking up one morning "bloated with identity," when one meets "again and again the same conflict." Maris writes in a lyric mode, with quiet wit and a self-consciously wise perspective joined with a good eye for detail. (You're not likely to forget the "unexpecting face" of a man knocked "somersaulting . . . /above a hood.") And if that sounds a little dull, that seems to be part of her point: These are workaday poems, and their insight or appeal will depend on whether one recognizes oneself in work, "a turgid mirror/whose revelations quiver/in recalculation:/we are something today;/we are nothing today./We are something today;/we are nothing tomorrow." The reverberating r in these lines makes audible Maris's central aim of downshifting, as it were, from "revelation" to "recalculation." --Bookslut

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Product Details

• Paperback: 65 pages
• Publisher: Four Way Books (October 30, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884800718
• ISBN-13: 978-1884800719
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,141,807 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4.0 out of 5 stars What's not to like?, August 6, 2011

By 

Simon G. Barrett (london, england) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Book of Jobs: Poems (Paperback)

A lovely first collection - handsome, too - from someone who, as they say, 'divides her time' between our shores - funny, sad, touching

5.0 out of 5 stars A distinctive, original, passionate, 'word skilled' voice, July 7, 2007

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Book of Jobs: Poems (Paperback)

The free verse poetry of Kathryn Maris offers a distinctive, original, passionate, 'word skilled' voice that will engage both the mind and the imagination. The profusely imaged poetry comprising "The Book Of Jobs" will well serve to introduce Kathryn's poetic wit and lyrical wisdom to an appreciative readership and is enthusiastically recommended for personal, academic, and community library Contemporary Poetry collections. 'The Heart that Works': In my abdomen there is a heart that works./For how long will it work? Will it work/if the heart in my chest is tethered or skewed?//Will it work in the artificial light, in the soup/of the Day, or when a song becomes a feint?/Will it work? Will it work?//O swift, regular beats on the incommensurate screen,/is a heart that works a heart that lurks behind the world?/You inside me, I envy you your working heart.//But will it work in the morning? Will it work insofar/as I haven't erred by bringing it to earth?/Will it work in the icy absence of others of its kind?