Sediment (Stahlecker Selections) [Paperback]

Sandy Tseng (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1884800939 | ISBN-13: 978-1884800931 | Publication Date: October 15, 2009

In Sandy Tseng's first collection, leaving is both what remains and the act of going to another place, a different lifestyle, an unknown afterlife. This book recounts the pleasures and terrors of transition, of being "in between languages." We travel with Tseng, learning that the sediment of our lives--received traditions, half-recalled memories, accrued possessions--might also be the fragments by which we recognize a future life, here or elsewhere.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This vivid and clean-lined debut weaves strands of personal and family narrative into short poems with wider symbolic force; the best of them contemplate both autobiography and ecocatastrophe. Tseng's free verse creates strong moods: “Apple season, the dog eats his fill and falls asleep beside the space heater./ I thought the world was going to end years ago.” Questions of East Asian immigration and assimilation dominate some early poems before giving way to more abstract spiritual dilemmas: “if our books burn up,/ we will suffer loss and still be saved,/ as those escaping through the flames.” Tseng is equally at home depicting modern cityscapes and presenting far-flung rural locales. In both, she seeks sublimity while restricting herself to familiar words; in both she is able to see impending doom, as when the title poem presents the Indonesian tsunami and Hurricane Katrina in two haunting pages (“The last thing we see is a wall of white crashing... Oil rig evacuations. Cars and cars against the sea wall”). In Tseng's strongest work, everything takes on a surprising, religious dimension as the book drives to a close: “The voice of the Lord is upon the water,” she warns: “he intends to strip the forests bare.” (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

"This vivid and clean-lined debut weaves strands of personal and family narrative into short poems with wider symbolic force; the best of them contemplate both autobiography and ecocatastrophe. Tseng's free verse creates strong moods:'Apple season, the dog eats his fill and falls asleep beside the space heater./ I thought the world was going to end years ago.'..."--Publishers Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 80 pages
• Publisher: Four Way (October 15, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884800939
• ISBN-13: 978-1884800931
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,114,829 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sandy Tseng is the author of Sediment, published by Four Way Books in October 2009. Among her awards are The Nation's Discovery Award, the Louis Untermeyer Tuition Scholarship from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and the Vira I. Heinz Foundation scholarship. She has held residencies at the MacDowell Colony and Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and her poems have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Crazyhorse, Fugue, Hunger Mountain, The Nation, Third Coast, and other journals. She teaches at Metropolitan State College of Denver.