Incarnate: Story Material [Paperback]

Thalia Field (Author)

Book Description

Series: New Directions Paperbook | Publication Date: October 1, 2004

An enthralling new work by one of America's foremost experimental writers.

Thalia Field's inventive new book explores the very condition of being incarnate: how, invested with human form, we experience both suffering and ecstasy from childhood to adulthood to death. As with her previous book published by New Directions, Point and Line (2000), Incarnate defies categorization: it "industriously works the sparsely populated and as yet underdeveloped borderlands between poetry, fiction, theater, and contemporary classical music" (Review of Contemporary Fiction). In Incarnate: Story Material, she continues to reach beyond borders, examining how, trapped in our own stories, we act and react in a world of solidity, perceiving something "other" close at hand. With its amazing variety of poetic and prose-like forms, driven by a fierce and playful intelligence, Incarnate: Story Material challenges and moves us.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Field's debut Point and Line (2000) won praise for its obvious intelligence and its genre-bending forms; the second collection from this experimental poet, playwright and essayist offers perhaps even more various narrative material. The scientifically minded Field blurs the line between human beings and animals, between actions and thoughts, and between captive and wild, understood and incomprehensible, beasts. These blurs come together in "Zoologic," the non-narrative, two-character verse play that concludes the volume, and for which all the earlier pieces prepare us. One of the best pieces, "Feeling into Motion," largely examines the history and geography of rail, road and air routes through Alaska: "Can we name a child 'Alaska,' " Field asks, "for the action which is directed towards the sea?" A long (perhaps too long) central poem scrambles and retells episodes from Homer's Odyssey, returning to the animalistic Cyclops, and to the sirens' visceral appeal. "Autocartography" puns repeatedly on the poet's name to suggest that she herself is both her own poetic territory and its map. Field's frequently shifting scenes evoke Alice Notley, Anne Carson and James Joyce, though rarely all three at once. Her combination of conceits with intuitions generate poems which beg, sometimes for empathy, sometimes for a decoder ring: critics and ordinary readers may find themselves simultaneously baffled and pleased.
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Review

Challenging preconceptions of what poetry and ultimately language can do, Incarnate is a book that celebrates possibility and eternal becoming. -- American Review, Robert Doto

Field's poetry is mesmerizing, complex, and stands on its own with original forms. -- The Bloomsbury Review, March/April 2005

Full of discreet experimental forms offering a space for contemporary poetry to inhabit. -- Rain Taxi, Francis Raven, Summer 2005

Poignant, compelling reading that is equal parts cerebral, mythical, vulnerable and political. -- The Believer, Miranda F. Mellis, June/July 2005

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 144 pages
• Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation; First Edition edition (October 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0811215997
• ISBN-13: 978-0811215992
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 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: #832,437 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gift, A Giver, A Grateful Nation, June 8, 2005

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Incarnate: Story Material (Paperback)

I must have been out of the loop when New Directions issued Thalia Field's book last October. Either that, or they aren't doing a very good job letting the people know about her new release. It has been five years since Thalia Field's first book and the mob has gotten hungry since then. Like the little boy said to his grandma in the movie theater, "Look Grandma, there's one poor lion up there hasn't got a Christian!"

That's how I have felt ever since Point and Line came out and momentarily quashed my hunger for more of Thalia Field's innovative fictions. It has been a long hungry haul since 2000, but intermittently, here and there, if you kept your eyes peeled to the little magazines, you might have stumbled on a piece by her. There was one in the Chicago Review, another in Fence. Influential places like that. Now finally a whole book and it's been available for awhile. Well you could have knocked me over with a feather. Luckily a friend of mine who works with Ms. Field sent me this book to celebrate an important life occasion. Otherwise I'd still be hungry. The book begins with one of her best stories so far, the life of her name, with a clever pun on "Field," as though it were some of Charles Olson's Field research, based on (what seems like) some painstaking research into different sites in the USA called "Thalia." It's a challenging tour de force and it comes to an end at the perfect place, more of an achievement than that sounds in this age where everything goes on for a beat too long. Field has what amounts to a perfect ear when it comes to laying down the ground rules for her piece (whatever it is at the moment) and then breaking them slightly when she needs to, and then letting the inner form of the story dictate its conclusion. Similarly, another important "autocartography" story, one called "Feeling Into Motion" takes up the knotty issue of the USA's relation to Alaska: signed, sealed, and delivered, who were the plotters who delivered this vast Indian land into our hands? Field shows us in little steps, what happens to a nation when its leaders secede. She is half a poet, half a seer, and huge chunks of her mind belong to history and to the commission of mercy.

I have one bone to pick and that is with her publisher. I address my concluding remarks to New Directions press.

New Directions, you were the people who went whole hog for Robert Duncan when he had the looney idea to print big chunks of GROUND WORK exactly as they looked coming off his Olivetti. You went the extra mile for him, and yet for Thalia Field you force her to print her important poem, STORY MATERIAL, *sideways* just because its lines are too long to accommodate your miniature size page widths. Boy, does that look cheap. New Directions, you were once the estimable press people longed to publish with, now you're making them look silly amateurs. And what is up with continuing to print, on the copyright page, the words, "New Directions Books are published for James Laughlin." Didn't he die, like, a long long time ago? Oh well, they're still printing "Dear Abby" and "Ann Landers too," it's just branding I suppose. Thanks anyhow for publishing such a fine book!