Except By Nature [Hardcover]

Sandra Alcosser (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 1999

Except by Nature is the winner of the 1998 James Laughlin Award of The Academy of American Poets.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Sandra Alcosser's third book of poetry, a National Poetry Series winner selected by Eamon Grennan, rewards you with a walk through nature's mysteries and beauty--and the maze of human nature. Like nature, the climate of the poems is not always comfortable, but the language is exquisite and clear.

One of Alcosser's frequent themes is the cost of courage. In "Card Game Blind River," the speaker braves alligator gar and other swamp denizens to make camp. But when rattlesnakes awaken in the cabin's attic, she must steel herself so that her companions won't "hear the high 'e' of my mind." In the prose poem "A Warrior's Tale," Rachel, who is at a party, suffers through listening to the story of a young woman's rape and survival, all the while recalling her own assault. She breaks down, but only "in another room so that the men could not see her."

Spirituality waits in abundance in the natural world. The poem "The Anatomy of Air" explains, "when the world is too sharp / I walk toward the canyon" where "wind slicks back the needles" and sadness dissipates, "duffled, / by the palpitating air." In "Flame," a husband leaves his wife for a winter, after cutting and cording "the most resonant pines of our life" to keep her warm and to keep him on her mind. In his absence, "they would be / his bolt of news unfurling, my face flushed red / and red again by the hot inquiring tongues." Except by Nature invites you to return to its poems again and again. --Susan Swartwout --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

"Like a marriage. Like a nation. Like a haunting, this story tells me." In lithe, muscular language, Alcosser's best poems inflect the pastoral with the political. The Atchafalaya swamp of Louisiana, the family autobody shop in the Midwest of her youth and the Bitterroot range of Montana where she now livesAeach serve in turn as sites for multifaceted poems of place: "If you were born to a gooey/ bayou, two faithless fathers,/ a silent mother, sleazy clouds/ overhead for pillows,// you'd celebrate too." This second full-length collection, chosen by Eamon Grennan for the National Poetry Series, comes more than a decade after Alcosser's first, and moves among forms as well as locales: there are journalistic prose poems like "A Warrior's Tale," (which unflinchingly approaches extreme violence against women), and free-verse lyrics that dream after ecstatic encounters ("In Case of Rapture This Taxi Will Explode"). Throughout, the poet marvels at the grandeur of landscapesAand the scratchings out of family and friends within them. Some of the poems veer precariously close to clich?Aseveral set in Louisiana stop just short of voodoo and a funeral paradeAbut the blunt carnality of others ("his bolt of news unfurling, my face flushed red/ and red again by the hot inquiring tongues") gives them a welcome urgency.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover
• Publisher: Graywolf Press; First Edition, First Printing edition (1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1555972993
• ISBN-13: 978-1555972998
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,502,609 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An astonishing book of nature and eros, psyche and shadow., June 2, 1998

By 

Jan Lee Ande ([e-mail]) (La Jolla, California) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Except by Nature (National Poetry Series Books) (Paperback)

The new book by Sandra Alcosser "Except by Nature arrived last week and I have been reading and rereading it ever since, turning it over in my hands, carrying it with me. How aesthetically lovely the book itself is, the paper ivory and thick. I love the dimensions of the book, how each poem has plenty of white space surrounding it. Prose pieces introduce the three sections of poems. Thus the book begins: "Dream and fester. The potential for evil and irrational growth. So the tropics with their perfume and juice threatened to consume...." And so we enter an erotic, strange, quivering world. My favorite poems just now are "Worms," "What Makes the Grizzlies Dance," "By the Nape," "Woodpecker," "Zulu Time," and "Greenhand." "Burying the Carnival" leaves me shaking on each rereading. Here are a few lines from "In the Jittering World": In a world jittering with possibility, / how did I come to this sour basement / in a Southern city to grade rhetoric, / water dripping all day down drainpipes, / and at night for recreation, / to nurse a lizard? I love his sticky toe pads, / the way he rests / between death and life, leaf-veined, reflective. / Carefully he picks across the blue carpet, as if / it were a globe laid flat." This is an astonishing book--of nature and eros, psyche and shadow, well titled from the last line of "Skiing by Moonlight": "Except by nature--as a woman, I will be ungovernable."