Winner of the 2001 Fence Modern Poets Series Prize, selected by Allen Grossman. With the persistent, dappled vision of an ecstatic pragmatist, Joyelle McSweeney sees things as they are through "the modern knothole." Eventuality, delicately shaded by the fine and fearless intelligence of these kinesthetic arrangements, coincides with imaginative possibility; the resulting poems are as much mind as place.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In describing, in turn, a "Toy House," "Toy Bed" "Toy Enterprise," "Toy Election," "Toy Maternity," and nine separate accounts of "The Voyage of the Beagle," one might think Joyelle McSweeney lacks high seriousness in The Red Bird, selected by Alan Grossman for Fence Books. While certainly playful and relentlessly up to date (check the "Celebrity Cribs" poem), McSweeney's is a satirist's sensibility, wickedly sending up, in "Avian light," the identities and settings her speaker encounters, whether in books, "a maritime chart of the Yensai Delta" or "Afterlives": "Forsythia opens its bright palm and the woman pushes her stroller out of it."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Review
"American poetry divides into two hostile camps. On one side stand the 'innovative' poets, who trace their lineage to Charles Olson (the poet who probably coined the term postmodernism) and who like to experiment radically--and often rather dryly--with language. On the other are the 'mainstreamers,' who are more interested in emotional connection than theoretical savvy or linguistic play. Innovatives claim that mainstreamers don't think; mainstreamers claim that innovatives don't feel. But this quarrel is beside the point in the work of some of our best young poets. Take Joyelle McSweeney, a 26-year-old with a Harvard degree, two years at Oxford, and an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa's elite Writers' Workshop. Her language is innovative, charged with wit, energy, and surprise, but underneath the surface runs a mysterious current of real emotion... ...If it isn't always clear exactly what's going on in her poems, they have so much glamour and charm that we're led further and further into them--and into poetry itself, which always has been, and always should be, something of a mystery."--Jon Spayde, www.utne.com
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
More About the Author
Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
2 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The free verse work of a truly gifted writer,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Red Bird (Fence Modern Poets Series) (Paperback)
The Red Bird showcases the poetry of Joyelle McSweeney (Winner of the first annual Fence Modern Poets Series Prize) and fully documents for the reader the free verse work of a truly gifted writer. The Premier: On a wave of resignations and dismissals without precedent/I rode in. I drove in from Connecticut. I was called in./I sanded down graffiti from the door/of my concert box. I took the sixth seventh and eighth floors./I stood out under the red tree and opened the preferable flesh./I took the eighth ninth and tenth. I was deeply/in love with the building. Stings the cuts on my fingers,/rinds against my toes. A fat brown leaf/into the red minnowy leaflets drops and stops dropping./They look down at me. A tenterhook adapted/from the linen trade, a cartilaginous collar: I rode in./If you can't chase down your butcher for a cut of white king,/see me. If you're from hell, you're from hell, see/Fat leaf at rest in the still red tree see me. Who am/I if I mean what I sometimes mean.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
|
|
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product).
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
