Muse, the first full-length collection from poet Susan Aizenberg, brings together poems of personal history, elegy, and the complex lives of artists, writers, and “ordinary” people, in an exploration of the relationship between art and life, esthetics and ethics. She is sharp-eyed in purpose, trying to understand “what love is” in a continual shifting between loss and knowledge. While “there is no other world than this one” for Aizenberg, nevertheless she finds a world of affirmation. Aizenberg sings elegant blues, keeps a perfect balance between elaboration and restraint with formal skill that is both impressive and consoling, reminding us that poetry is a form of intelligence in which music creates a world full of mystery and depth.
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“How can art and life coexist? This is one of the big questions that Susan Aizenberg raises in the superbly crafted, deeply felt poems of Muse. From a beautiful elegy for the poet Lynda Hull to a brilliant sequence on Vivian Eliot, we are moved by narrative, delighted by the music of speech, and dazzled by glittering imagery. But ultimately Aizenberg forces us to confront disturbing questions about how the aesthetic can be reconciled with the ethical. She faces these questions unflinchingly. They are the heart of her enterprise. A real, three-dimensional human being emerges out of the phrasing, the images, and the thoughts of these memorable poems, shaped out of words but entangled in the gritty detail of ordinary life.”—Maura Stanton, author of Glacier Wine
“Clearly Susan Aizenberg has chosen to serve the most demanding of the nine muses, Clio, the muse of history. Aizenberg honors her with rich and vital poems of personal history, elegy, and what could be called Lyrics of the Long Haul—poems of the middle years, poems which testify to the difficulties of grace and the precious arrival of wisdom. This is an elegant and sustained volume. More importantly, it is an instructive one.”—David Wojahn, author of The Falling Hour
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Muse, the first full-length collection from poet Susan Aizenberg, brings together poems of personal history, elegy, and the complex lives of artists, writers, and "ordinary" people, in an exploration of the relationship between art and life, esthetics and ethics. She is sharp-eyed in purpose, trying to understand "what love is" in a continual shifting between loss and knowledge. While "there is no other world than this one" for Aizenberg, nevertheless she finds a world of affirmation. Aizenberg sings elegant blues, keeps a perfect balance between elaboration and restraint with formal skill that is both impressive and consoling, reminding us that poetry is a form of intelligence in which music creates a world full of mystery and depth.
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Inside This Book
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First Sentence:
Rain hushes this February morning, that same infusing chill that once entered the slim bones of your hands until they ached, flushed and swollen joints another of your body's betrayals; that laved the grit of your radiant cities, brassy asphalt fragrance rising, mnemonic, off the charged streets, minor chords of your unappeasable ghosts laddering its scent on the weather. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Rain hushes this February morning, that same infusing chill that once entered the slim bones of your hands until they ached, flushed and swollen joints another of your body's betrayals; that laved the grit of your radiant cities, brassy asphalt fragrance rising, mnemonic, off the charged streets, minor chords of your unappeasable ghosts laddering its scent on the weather. Read the first page Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Van Gogh New!
Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 15
books:
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- Report on Torture by Amnesty International on page 27
- The Age of Innocence (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations) by Edith Wharton on page 10
- Misery Prefigured (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) by Adjunct Professor J Allyn Rosser PhD in Back Matter
- The Age of Innocence (Modern Library Classics) by Edith Wharton on page 10
- This Country of Mothers (Crab Orchard Award Series in Poetry) by Ms. Julianna Baggott M.F.A. in Back Matter
See all 15 books this book cites
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