Siste Viator [Paperback]

Sarah Manguso (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2006

"This book is for those of us who want to read more poetry but are frequently stopped by its--what is it? Its chilly self-seriousness? Its unwillingness to hold our hand every so often, while cracking an easy joke? Either way, Sarah Manguso, like her spiritual siblings David Berman and Tony Hoagland, is a friendly kind of savior and guide. Her writing is gorgeous and cerebral (imagine Anne Carson) but she doesn't skimp on the wit (imagine Anne Carson's ne'er-do-well niece). Poetry-fearers, don't back away from this beautiful book; these might be the pages that bring you back into the form." --Dave Eggers

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The title's Latin translates as "traveler, halt," a traditional opening for inscriptions on gravestones; Manguso's enticing sophomore effort has both the gravity of epitaphs and enough oddity to halt readers in their tracks. Clearer and grimmer than her debut, The Captain Lands in Paradise, this book often uses aphoristic sentences in place of lines: "A good horse runs even at the shadow of the whip"; "The second-hardest thing I have to do is not be longing's slave." Dating and flirtation, astronomical discoveries, the omnipresence of death, unanswerable queries ("Which stories of farms are the ones that can save me?")—all move within the speaker's mind in a manner that the poems are designed to arrest. "A coin you dropped when you took your pants off is still on the floor," she declares in "Address to an Absent Lover." "Please come back and pick it up." That lover might be the reader or simply a romantic partner, or God: the essence and power of Manguso's method lie in our not knowing which is which. (Mar.)
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About the Author

SARAH MANGUSO is the author of The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002). With Jordan Davis she coedited the anthology Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books (2004). She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at the Pratt Institute. Her poems and prose have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Believer, Boston Review, The London Review of Books, McSweeney's, the New Republic, The Paris Review, and three editions of The Best American Poetry series.

Product Details

• Paperback: 63 pages
• Publisher: Four Way Books (March 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1884800696
• ISBN-13: 978-1884800696
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.1 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,301,373 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sarah Manguso's most recent book is The Guardians: An Elegy (2012). Her memoir, The Two Kinds of Decay (2008), was named an Editors' Choice by the New York Times Sunday Book Review and was short-listed for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. Her other books include the story collection Hard to Admit and Harder to Escape (2007), included in in McSweeney's One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box, and the poetry collections Siste Viator (2006) and The Captain Lands in Paradise (2002), which was named a Favorite Book of the Year by the Village Voice. Honors for her writing include a Hodder Fellowship and the Rome Prize. A citizen of the United States and Ireland, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars It Means, "Stop, Traveler", October 24, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Siste Viator (Paperback)

My publishers always tell me to refrain from titling my books in any other language than English, and yet Sarah Manguso has found a wide audience for her poetry even when her book has a Latin name. I like it, for it gives the book a sort of ancient Ruskin feeling, or Carlyle, something very solid you can sink your teeth into. In addition we are more likely to respond to a plea like "stop, stranger," when we hear it in Latin. Manguso's writing seems fast on its feet, colloquial and speedy like that Mineola Prep boy Frank O'Hara idolized, and yet it has a quiet slow side to it, its long lines sometimes slowing to a crawl by the time they meet the right margin of the page, thus matching the request its title makes, as if to say, if you will be still, so will I.

Her poems about poetry itself have an amusing steel to them ("Sing to me little face/ Sing of the little faces you remember from life") but this collection improves on her first in its treatment of love and sensuality. If you've read Mina Loy's "Pig Cupid" poems, and wanted to see more of them, SISTE VIATOR might sate your need, though Manguso's contemporary love of contingency is far removed from Loy's modernism. The talking animals and objects of CAPTAIN come back anew, and the cryptic metaphors--the lovers as "two volumes lying on the bed,/ Maybe mystery novels, touching." In "Thers Is Such a Thing," an ageless voice comes out of lost eons to reminisce, "I spoke to fire as to a bright lover in the forest/ Whose brightness was for me."

I wish there were a bit more stanzaic variety, or maybe a few poems that were longer than a page. Nowadays the short poem has returned with a vengeance, perhaps designed to fit into one computer screen, or written on a computer, no scrolling down. It's not that Manguso's lyric inspiration seems ever to flag, perhaps she just feels more comfortable writing in short spurts, but it makes for a certain sameness which many will find comforting. Everything else is so strange, unique, disconcerting; its beauty comes from the underside, like a log turned over on the forest floor to reveal a fan of truffles. When you're jaded with other poetry, that's when you go to Sarah Manguso. Young people of today turn to her writing the way people of my age once went to stand in front of Nico at the time of her MARBLE INDEX, or parsed out the lyrics to Love's FOREVER CHANGES, shuttling like metronomes in front of the stage. She will long be imitated, but the weary animation of her best work will never be equalled.

She might have done without that quote on the back of the book from Dave Eggers though. If the point is that here is a poetry for people who don't like "poetry," the poems make that claim all by themselves, and if she were "Anne Carson's ne'er-do-well niece," would we want to read a whole book by her? Maybe Johnny Carson's ne'er-do-well niece.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Captain Rides Again!, September 23, 2006

By 

A reader (Thetford, VT) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Siste Viator (Paperback)

Fans of THE CAPTAIN LANDS IN PARADISE will not be disappointed in Manguso's new work. Simultaneously dark and playful, it is startling in its insights and imagery (...I'm on my knees in the music room, driving the brush tip into my open eye./I am painting myself a bridge. I can almost see it.") and slyly funny ("My favorite euphemism for death is the future"). Dark though they often are, the poems function as a kind of lullaby not to be afraid of the dark, and are strangely comforting. Manguso's is a unique voice and sensibility, and SISTE VIATOR a book to read over and over.

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, November 11, 2011

By 

Osiris - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Siste Viator (Paperback)

A book full of very deep poetry and stuff that really gets you to think. The poems are also fairly short, so you don't have to suffer if there is one you particularly dislike. Most of these poems were good.