Hotel Imperium: Poems (Contemporary Poetry (Univ of Georgia Paperback)) [Paperback]

Rachel Loden (Author)

Book Description

Series: Contemporary Poetry (Univ of Georgia Paperback) | Publication Date: December 1999

Winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition. Grounded in deep and thoughtful awareness, this complex collection of poems combines history, sexuality, pop-culture, and political experience with edgy, wry, often absurd humor and an underlying penchant for the macabre. Speaking as intimately of the fall of the Soviet Union as they do of the cinematic crimes and misdemeanors of Woody Allen or the redemptive passion of Little Richard, their tone ranges from the furious to the elegiac, with a comic edge that borrows as much from the gallows as it does from the Borscht Belt. As rich in rhyme, music, and literary allusion as it is in multifaceted meaning, HOTEL IMPERIUM presents a surprising blend of sophistication, playfulness, and penetrating wit.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Pop and politics haven't had their hats handed to them in this Popian a manner in ages. Reminiscent of the acute fantasias of Susan Wheeler and Elaine Equi, though temperamentally closer to Connie Deanovich, Loden's poems talk about what people are (or have been) talking about, but with barbs hilariously sharpened. Targets include most of the recent Republican presidents (mercifully, she exempts Ford), beauty culture, Woody Allen, Alan Greenspan, Dan Rather and insurance companies: "For an eye, not an eye./ For a tooth, forget it," she writes in "Memo from the Benefits Department." Poetry consumers will find special interest in language/system queries such as "DCEASE," a surprisingly moving meditation that begins "There are two Elvis Presleys in the Social Security Death Master File (DCEASE). The King's social security number is 409-52-2002." And language enthusiasts will approve of "Last W&T," a rearrangement, refrigerator-poetry-magnet style, of the words of Richard Nixon's will. The danger that cynicism will overtake the indignation that propels Loden is averted by the joy, bafflement and innocence of her poems that take icons as incidental examples, not front-and-center subjects. Take "The Little Richard Story": "On a day like this,/ without the music/ of appearances, creatures/ could land and you/ would not be able to explain/ anything to them, not/ the fearless industry/ of beavers, or why dust bunnies/ prefer the dark, not even/ how Little Richard/ himself came into being." Appeals to such other believers as Gerard Manley Hopkins or the psalmist work less well, but on the whole, Loden's first full collection marches smartly down the path of satire. (Dec.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

...Loden makes the fragmentation and senselessness that are the 20th century's legacy dance with a kind of macabre glee.... -- Salon Magazine, Feb. 11, 2000, reviewed by Melanie Rehak

...Loden's first full collection marches smartly down the path of satire. -- Publishers Weekly, December 6, 1999

...With wit and mastery of her subject matter, ...this ironic look at our times is a fine, illuminating, and funny read. -- Jury, Bay Area Book Reviewers Awards, March 2000

101 Conflations
Against Angels
Blues For The Evil Empire
Bride Of Tricky D.
Carnal Acknowledgments
A Catechism For Imaginary Virgins
Clueless In Paradise
Continental Drift
Dcease
The Death Of Checkers
Five Mountain Agoraphobic Holidays
General Dudayev Enters The New World
Glasburyon
The Gospel According To Clairol
Headline From A Photograph By Richard Avedon
The Killer Instinct
The Last Of Bebe
Last W & T
Lingerie Ads In The Sixties
The Little Richard Story
Lives Of The Saints
Memo From The Benefits Department
Memories Of San Clemente
My Exchange
My Geomancer
My Night With Philip Larkin
My Test Market
Ode To Mr. Bone
On Beria's Lap
Poetry And Sorrow In A 'right-to-sing' State
Premillennial Tristesse
Reagan Ascending Into Hollywood
Reconstructed Face
The Revenant's Tune
Revenge, Like Habanero Peppers
Roger The Scrivener
The Rowboat At Vladivostok
Terror Is My Business
Variations On A Theme By Woody Allen
Walking With Xenia
We Are Sorry To Say
You Will Enter History
-- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®

If you are looking for a book of poems ruthless and luxuriant enough to see you into the third millennium, take along Rachel Loden's HOTEL IMPERIUM, winner of the 1999 University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poets Prize. These startling and vibrant poems capture the tristesse of the post-apocalyptic era, the whimpering end of the Cold War, and the "irrational exuberance" that comes "after the end."...

...We are lucky to have in Rachel Loden a troubadour unafraid to sing of terror, and a brilliant balladeer of our history's shabbiest episodes. As we move into a new millennium, we should listen carefully to this self-professed "rhapsodist of cunning" and "songbird of iniquity" as she sings sweetly of "love, revenge, remaindering." -- Kathleen Crown in American Letters & Commentary, Fall 1999

Rachel Loden's poetry is rife with difficult, subversive pleasures. It is also very funny, and refreshingly alert. -- Rain Taxi Review of Books, Spring 2000, reviewed by Fred Muratori

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press (December 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0820321699
• ISBN-13: 978-0820321691
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.5 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,333,360 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Rachel Loden's second full-length book Dick of the Dead was published by Ahsahta Press in May 2009. She is also the author of Hotel Imperium, which won the Contemporary Poetry Series Competition of the University of Georgia Press. It was named one of the ten best poetry books of the year by the San Francisco Chronicle, which called it "quirky and beguiling," and was shortlisted for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. Loden has also published four chapbooks, including The Last Campaign (which won the Hudson Valley Writers' Center chapbook competition) and The Richard Nixon Snow Globe (Wild Honey Press). Her work has appeared in New American Writing, The Paris Review, two editions of the Best American Poetry series, Western Wind: An Introduction to Poetry, and many other magazines and anthologies. Loden's microplay, "A Quaker Meeting in Yorba Linda," was performed in New York as part of Plays on Words: A Poets Theater Festival curated by Tony Torn, Lee Ann Brown and Corina Copp. Awards include a Pushcart Prize, a Fellowship in Poetry from the California Arts Council, and a grant from the Fund for Poetry.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a poet witty and grave, May 19, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Hotel Imperium: Poems (Contemporary Poetry (Univ of Georgia Paperback)) (Paperback)

I loved the poems in "Hotel Imperium", which manage to be topical, witty, passionate, tender, and elegiac-sometimes all within a few stanzas. Rachel Loden speaks to-or channels-Richard Nixon and (Little) Richard Penniman, Svetlana Stalin and Marilyn Monroe; I would call these poems political, but only in the sense that Auden meant when he wrote "There is no such thing as the State/And no one exists alone." As for the style, I hardly know what to call it except "bebop Augustan," if that's any help. Read the poems yourself.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hotel Imperium, by Rachel Loden, July 8, 2000

By 

Anne Pitkin (Seattle, WA , USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hotel Imperium: Poems (Contemporary Poetry (Univ of Georgia Paperback)) (Paperback)

Rachel Loden's HOTEL IMPERIUM is the best kind of political satire: passionate, wildly comic, and aimed at the language and mentality which make possible the folly and cruelties of the twentieth century. The poems are witty, as the poems of Donne, Dryden and Pope are witty--agile, musical, possessing an elegance of form that is put to use in the service of this poet's moral indignation, which often manifests as irreverence. "She is not there, except her body/ is the specter in her Living/Underwear." Or "EMPIRE'S the thing/ that totters forward with its mouse/ears on, paterfamilias/ of so many little feet." Like Swift, she is often savage, while at the same time exhuberantly clever: "I remain the rhapsodist of cunning, blithering/songbird of iniquity, and while-u-wait/ the law I love moves through here/ like a wall of fire, and it is leaving/ everything exactly as it stands, and/ saving nothing in its wake.

The poet's enterprise is weighty, and though the poems are a romp, beauty has a place here as well. Take the following from "The Rowboat at Vladivostok:" "Now your voice is full/ of what it was to leave the Marianas. on that morning. Antares graying in the sky,/ the tradewinds blowing through the porpoises.

I could not put this book down, once I started it. Then I went back and re-read at random, for pure pleasure. Loden has accomplished a rare feat--she has taken on the enormous foolishness behind evil and harnessed it in these tight, energetic, and graceful poems.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best Bet, June 2, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Hotel Imperium: Poems (Contemporary Poetry (Univ of Georgia Paperback)) (Paperback)

"The heart's a mouth" running a "rivulet//of chatter." But make no mistake about it. Rachel Loden may be talking as fast as she can but what she has to say and how she says it is neither idle nor trivial. The poems in HOTEL IMPERIUM are brilliant, sassy, boldly irreverant, disarmingly subversive. Nothing and no one, from Chinese terra cotta warriors in Xian to Richard Nixon, from Dead Sea Scrolls to Elvis Presley, escapes her relentless yet "amiable eye"-an eye honed by a keen intelligence determined to cut everything down to size as it stalks and demystifies the "irrational exuberance" which seems to afflict our end-of-the-millennium world. In the HOTEL IMPERIUM of Rachel Loden, guests "sleep uneasy." The "terrible beauty" of William Butler Yeats undergoes a stunning metamorphosis/incarnation as Cruella de Ville: a "terrible beauty/is bored" while she plots "on her red/bedside telephone." The revenant of Psalm 23 becomes a "beautiful murderess" asking, "Who is the victim? That is so hard to say/Male or female, mineral or vegetable" as she draws "a hot bath/in the presence of her [my] enemies." Indeed, the HOTEL is a "break and enter paradise" in which Loden, "rhapsodist of cunning," "songbird of iniquity," doing time among "plump/and ripening perfidies" and "masterful deaths," test markets "our epic innocence." Reader beware: The poems in HOTEL IMPERIUM will crawl under your skin as they speak their way to your heart.