HIV, Mon Amour: Poems [Paperback]

Tory Dent (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 1, 2000

Tory Dent's is a voice like no other. Her use of language is virtuosic, complex, and plangent. These are daring poems that also dare the reader. HIV positive, Dent writes out of her own experience and profound refusal to look away or suspend feeling or turn from love. When her first book of poems, What Silence Equals, appeared in 1993, it was recognized as "immediately one of the great, necessary books to come out of the AIDS crisis, flinging its challenge in the face of death." With HIV, Mon Amour she moves further into the whirlwind -- as witness, lover, and observer.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In What Silence Equals (1993), Dent took seriously the algebra of the AIDS activist group Act Up's slogan, confronting her HIV+ status and its then seeming death sentence with intellectual clarity and fierce despair. The title's play on the classic Duras novel and art film Hiroshima, Mon Amour prepares the reader at once for Dent's gothic narratives, and for her constant supply of cultural allusions. "Fourteen Days in Quarantine" leads the poet to supersaturate the poem with names: she sees the TB room as a Richard Serra sculpture and herself in her hospital gown as a Nan Goldin portrait; the view of the East River out her window reminds her of film noir; CNN and A&E offer a synthetic version of an interior life, while a shifting array of pharmaceuticals suggest the energetic confusion of the hope they hold out. Making a few escapes from the secure room, the poet comes back to "the gut feeling [I] had always associated with the word 'Tory', the specific/ white pine amidst the general landscape." In poems dedicated to Marilyn Hacker, Sharon Olds and Adrienne Rich, among others, Dent reaches for a more obvious pathos. But in "Cinema Verite" she cuts from movie to movie, movingly cribbing material for a speech to her lover who has died in the epidemic. The title sequence contains the most annihilatingly subdued work in the book: "Nothing, not the winter trees reduced to underbrush at this distance nor their moulin-like branches, so baleful, have conspired against you." Chosen by Yusef Komunyakaa for this year's Academy of American Poets Laughlin award, Dent's second book records, unflinchingly, the mind's desperate clingings to life. (Nov.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Stylistically one of the most daring books to be published in recent years, Dent's astonishing cri de coeur is also emotionally one of the most challenging: in detail as harsh, exacting, and whitely lit as the hospital corridors she frequents, Dent details her ongoing battle with HIV. The lines pour out of her wrecklessly, as if she can barely contain herself and the knowledge that this may be her last chance. Indeed, they wind across the page like prose; but no prose is this visceral, this immediate. "When they wheeled me up from ER into respiratory isolation the space radiated/ as if a magnifying glass were put to it under a sunray." The entire book radiates--with unrepressed life. No wonder this won the 1999 James Laughlin Award.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 103 pages
• Publisher: Sheep Meadow; 1st edition (December 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1878818864
• ISBN-13: 978-1878818867
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.7 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #562,535 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Book of Poetry of the Year, February 29, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: HIV, Mon Amour: Poems (Hardcover)

This is a tremendous book of poetry that's already won one major prize and I read in the New York Times last week that it is nominated for the upcoming National Critics Circle Award. I have to admit I was completely stunned by it and think very, very highly of this book. More than any other poet that comes out of the "New York School" started by Frank O'Hara and continued by all sorts of interesting writers like John Ashbery, Ann Lauterbach and so forth, this is far and away the most powerful writer of the bunch. In large part this is because of her subject matter: focused on life and death issues rather than somewhat cosmetic aesthetic concerns, and with a much greater emotional range that what I've seen come out of experimental American poets before. Wow! The book is like wandering around in a huge, incredibly graphic and detailed dream, and its imagery is absolutely wonderful. I would recommend it highly to anyone interested at all in contemporary poetry. All best to Tory Dent, wherever you are!

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another triumph, July 8, 2000

By 

David Shapiro (Riverdale, NYC) - See all my reviews

This review is from: HIV, Mon Amour: Poems (Hardcover)

Tory Dent is one of the great poets of America. She has continued a new and dazzling poetry of dissent, which combines critical and lyrical and political elements. Like a true "performance artist," like Ann Hamilton, her poetry activates a complex narrative with historical reverberations. Her long poem on her "Quarantine" shows the heartbreaking honesty and anger of this wonderful poet. Each of her poems is as electrifying as a sculpture of abjection by Kiki Smith, whose wild talent most resembles Dent's We see in these poems the body of woman presented in all abjection and also as a triumph above fragility. In my lifetime, I have never seen such a startling poetry of ultimacy and its contents. It is a poetry to be placewd next to the architecrtural masques of the late John Hejduk, who had a like intensity and utter seriousness. The poetry of our time is too often whimsical, false and cheap, and made for consumption. Dent's poetry, like the best of Anna Swir the Polish baroque poet, is a revelation for her generation. It does not use confession unwisely; it does not refuse to name the poignant wounds, betrayals and loyalties. This is a poet who demands our truest attention and deserves it. I recommend her work without reservations.