How We Came to Stand on That Shore (River City Poetry Series) [Hardcover]

Jay Rogoff (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 96 pages
• Publisher: River City Pub; 1ST edition (April 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1579660320
• ISBN-13: 978-1579660321
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.5 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,865,144 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jay Rogoff is the author of four books of poetry. THE ART OF GRAVITY, which focuses on the meaning of dance for our lives, appeared from LSU Press in 2011.
THE LONG FAULT (LSU Press, 2008) examines the impact of history and art upon the individual imagination; HOW WE CAME TO STAND ON THAT SHORE (River City, 2003) presents poems about immigrant experience and family history, as well as a dairy-farming epithalamion; and THE CUTOFF (Word Works, 1995), winner of the Washington Prize for Poetry, follows a minor-league ballplayer and his family through a crucial season. He has also published TWENTY DANSES MACABRE (Spring Garden, 2010), a letterpress chapbook that rings darkly comic changes on the ancient Dance of Death motif. His next full-length collection, VENERA, which examines love in a variety of forms, is forthcoming from LSU Press in 2013.

Born in Queens, New York, Rogoff was educated at the Bronx High School of Science (where studying with Hank Levy made him serious about writing poetry), the University of Pennsylvania, and Syracuse University. He has taught at Syracuse, LeMoyne College, and, since 1993, at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY, where he is Lecturer in English.

His poems and critical prose appear in many journals, including Agni, Field, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Hopkins Review, Literary Imagination, Notre Dame Review, Ploushshares, Poetry London, and The Southern Review. He serves as dance critic for The Hopkins Review, contributes regularly to Ballet Review, and covers the summer New York City Ballet season in Saratoga Springs for the local daily, The Saratogian. Recent prizes include the 2009 Robert Watson Poetry Award for TWENTY DANSES MACABRE and a 2010 Pushcart Prize.

Rogoff lives in Saratoga Springs and travels frequently to Europe with his wife, art historian Penny Jolly, with whom he also often retreats to the tranquillity and isolation of their Adirondack cabin. He has just completed ENAMEL EYES, a book-length poetic sequence about 1870 Paris--the Franco-Prussian War as seen through the lens of the ballet Coppelia--and is at work on a collection of poems tentatively titled LOVING IN TRUTH.

Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Poetry that Makes Rigorously Good Sense, January 17, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: How We Came to Stand on That Shore (River City Poetry Series) (Hardcover)

While these wonderfully crafted, moving lyrics-stiched-together-to-make-narrative-segments get at much that is sad or falls short or is empty or is imperfect or fails or is betrayed or is incomplete or is some other way hard in one man's particular life, they also affirm the author in his act of experiencing these difficult things. Actually, the book presents many inner acts of the author's coming-to-terms with family members and other intimates and his own history--the givens and the actions of others and the choices he has made--as the author traverses decades in his life. And these inner acts are the poems themselves, which are ruthlessly honest and dense and linguistically various and fundamentally learned and playful and evocative and lovely. (Inner acts that turn out to be experiences the author also generously shares with us, his anonymous intimates.) The carefulness in the poems, the rigorousness of them, the prosodic sophistication of them, the intricacy of them, and the affirmative expectation of them tell us that the way one comes to understand the difficulty in one's life means everything.