Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies is a book of prose poems that captures the reader as a novel would. The book is full of the quirky details of life and memory. The book covers the author's life from World War II until the 1990's.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The details of a richly recalled life mingle with more abstract speculation about memory, gender and reading in these pleasantly associative, and occasionally striking, prose poems. Though they range in subjects from Hitler to the '50s icon of the title, from nail salons and optometrists to California, Judaism, opera, Gide and the nature of consciousness, Koestenbaum's one- and two-page works share a mode of construction: flat sentences about people, places and events mingle sometimes charmingly, sometimes at random with lyrical or lightly ironic abstractions. The poems seek a tone, and a cultural space, somewhere between Grace Paley's prose and Lyn Hejinian's influential My Life, though they do not always equal those models. Koestenbaum (Criminal Sonnets) can sound unduly startled by her memories: "Patti LuPone played Maria Callas on Broadway: from nowhere comes Patti LuPone." Elsewhere she simply unrolls bits of autobiography: youthful fears of Hitler, grown-up meals in Cambridge, Mass., a cancer scare, grown sons and "the suburban neighborhood where I was a conventional mother and wife" all remain of interest in themselves, but are rarely transformed by style. (One of her sons is the poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum.) At her best, as in "Rembrandt" or "Cassandra and Irene" (from which the collection takes its title), Koestenbaum's understated prose blocks explore neat hypotheses about life stories (her own and others'): "painters on townhouses... paint and pain and talk and talk. When they've moved on to their next job, what will distract me, what outside interference that becomes as much the main narrative as the main narrative." Main or not, these narratives will find their fans.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
About the Author
Koestenbaum, a native of Brooklyn, is the author of seven poetry books and chapbooks. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arts Council of Santa Clara County among others. Koestenbaum is a senior scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University, California.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Exquisite Meditations,
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This review is from: Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies (Questa Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)
Exquisite meditations, elliptical and epiphanic, all demanding attention and inviting re-reading. These one-page prose poems are worth the study that they require. At first the pieces seem like exercises in free association, but they emerge as deeply coherent. One thinks, Where is this set of images going? But it arrives at its destination precisely and just in time. The author has obviously struggled to find the mots justes, and has found them. The pieces create an effect tender and moody; then abruptly comes a twist of thought or a splash of offhand humor, e.g. "Clients at the nail salon sit on benches that make me think of sitting shiva."
5.0 out of 5 stars
I'm totally knocked out by this writer,
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This review is from: Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies (Questa Press Poetry Series) (Paperback)
These are prose poems at their best. What a unique voicethis writer has. These pieces are so many things at once like great jazz; there's stream of consciuosness but then there's plain talk even small talk and bits of conversation, humor, darkness, vivid memory, admission, eyewitness, randomness, structure. What a read! Like nothing I've ever read before. Ms. Koestenbaum is the real thing.
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