Nude Memoir [Paperback]

Laura Moriarty (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: 2000

Poetry. In this NUDE MEMOIR -- a roving gallery of nude torsos, nude cadaver toes, nude female lover and dead male lover, nude bride undoing God's and Duchamp's imposed abstract nakedness -- a woman is born. She is born of words formed when 'a sex (is) offered to a face.' She is terrible and she is wonderful. She is film noir married to Baroque. She is sentences, magnificance, lust. She is an edifice of loss amterializing and de-materializing on a line between poetry and prose that Laura Moriarty casts with the hand of a magician. I, too, dream of stripping bare this figure that the poet has so gorgeously decked out, to get to the heart of her namelessness. NUDE MEMOIR is an entrancing work of love, mourning, and resistance by a major poet -- Gail Scott.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A mature exhibition of the powers of late modern, or perhaps early "new modern," writing, Moriarty's latest, book-length poem is part spiritual autobiography, part post-feminist re-examination of the body and love, and part ambient wash of Steinian sonorities. The book begins with a reflection on the use of the nude in art and as metaphor ("The nude is given"), which gets torqued and turned over throughout the early sections as gender roles are troubled and estranged: "Diana puts together supsension systems beginning at 5 a.m. Energy. Apollo. The male nude. The female worker. Automobile. Moves and comes to rest. Potential movement. The machine. `Eyes shut like a bride' " Themes intermingle with no obvious regularity throughout the work as it dips into reflections on Duchamp's Green Box of 1914, slavery in Haiti, Buster Keaton, Nietzsche ("Supposing truth is a woman,"), the poet's relationship to the late poet Jerry Estrin, and a figure called "Kim" who could be a stand-in for Theresa Cha or Myung-Mi Kim ("Her name was Kim. She was named for the war."), whose works--part history, part autobiography--Nude Memoir resembles. Written in a quasi-paratactic shorthand that often breaks into "poetry," linebreaks and all, the book is perhaps weakened by the sameness of its clipped, telegraphed sentences and quotations, though the poet anticipates such objections:"A convoluted spirit invading itself like a false idea of the soul. She stole from her victims. They all became writers." Nevertheless, the low-intensity textures of Moriarty's writing are pointed, pleasurable and so full of detail and insight that many readers will find this "memoir" as gripping as a tell-all. (June)

Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Laura Moriarty was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, and in Northern California. She attended the University of California at Berkeley. She was the Director of the American Poetry Archives at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State University for many years. She has taught at Naropa University and Mills College and is now the Deputy Director of Small Press Distribution. Her books include A TONALIST (Nightboat Books, 2010), A SEMBLANCE: SELECTED AND NEW POEMS, 1975-2007 (Omnidawn, 2007), ULTRAVIOLETA (Atelos, 2006), SELF-DESTRUCTION (Post-Apollo Press, 2005), NUDE MEMOIR (Krupskaya, 2000), THE CASE (0 Books, 1998), SPICER'S CITY (Poetry New York, 1998), SYMMETRY (Avec Books, 1996), L'Archiviste (Zasterle 1991), LIKE ROADS (Kelsey St. Press, 1990), and RONDEAUX (Roof Books, 1990).

Product Details

• Paperback: 88 pages
• Publisher: Krupskaya; 1st edition (2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1928650074
• ISBN-13: 978-1928650072
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #838,870 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)