Maine: Poems [Paperback]

Jonah Winter (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 1, 2002

FROM THE BACK COVER

Hypocrite reader, mon somblobble, Jonah Winter will New York School you in the woodshed of his imagination! These poems remind me of Robert Bresson's Four Nights of a Dreamer, in which a tape recorder spews out the blurts and ravings of the heart at inappropriate moments. Maine is a hemorrhage of the goofy, the sinister, and the sublime. - James Cummins

Jonah Winter's poems are relentless attacks on the status quo. They turn pop culture on its head in hot pursuit of untainted love. And they are funny, if whiplash can be funny. Winter is a serious, new poet, with talent galore, blazing a trail, along which unknown treasures are sure to be found. - James Tate

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

If Garrison Keillor were in his early 30s, hailed from Texas and had a terrific sense of the poetic narrative line, Winter's debut might be his latest dispatch. From a sestina based on the names of "My Women" to "Hair Club for Corpses," the book exudes "the smell of Aramis and tweed,/ and, for some strange reason, ketchup."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From the Publisher

FROM THE PUBLISHER Advance praise for Maine:

I like Winter's conversational drive, his variety of subject matter, and his assertive but wacky voice ... Jonah Winter is unafraid to have a good time in his poems, and that is fortunate, because a sometimes overlooked law of poetic composition is that the more fun the writer has, the more fun the reader will have. In a sense [his poems] test the limits of silliness; on a deeper level they explode the notion that writing in a strict verse form acts as an inhibition or signifies a conservative bent of mind. - David Lehman, from his introduction

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Slope Editions; 1 edition (October 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0971821925
• ISBN-13: 978-0971821927
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,410,227 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars what? FUN poems?, February 4, 2003

By 

"bilje6" (Montreal, PQ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Maine: Poems (Paperback)

In their blurbings for the book, David Lehman and James Tate both write how Jonah Winter has fun with language, form and theme. It's true. He writes sestinas about cowboys, for crying out loud -- for once, content allowed to breathe new hilarious life via form, rather than being crammed into a form or restricted by that form. This is a New York-y book and a New York School-y book, hence Lehman's interest in it I suppose, but don't let that prejudice you. Winter is going in even more strange directions and talking about even more mundane/absurd people and places than O'Hara, Schuyler et al. Cool book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars MAINE: The Way Poetry Should Be, February 12, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: Maine: Poems (Paperback)

Are you sick of those boring, polished, egocentric journal entries which have been passed off as "poetry" for the past 40 years or so? If so, check out MAINE -- the most dynamic, bizarre, unpredictable collection of poems to be published in several generations. At last: a poet not afraid to have a voice -- or actually, many voices! Avoiding the pitfalls of the various "schools" of poetry, Winter's sometimes wacky, sometimes disturbing persona poems are really out there -- in a good way. With total command of the English language and various poetic forms, this Outsider (where did he come from?) covers more ground than one would think possible in an 80-page book. There are sonnets, sestinas, odes, a whole section of ballads which reference points as disparate as Marshal Dillon, Handel's "Messiah" and icicles clinging to the limbs of frozen lovers... (In general, there is no shortage of erotic imagery in this book, and not the usual sort of Pablum that could have been written by a computer -- this stuff is strong, it's personal, and it's weird.) Geographically, Winter also covers a lot of ground, from New York to the Old West to utterly mythicized desert and northern landscapes. This is an amazing compedium of subject matter, emotions, dramatic voices, poetic approaches and lexicons. And with none of the usual "Me me me" obscurity which isolates most contemporary academic and "language" poetry from a potential readership, you will feel quite welcome in the airy rooms of these superbly original and accessible poems.