Poetry. SOUVENIR DE CONSTANTINOPLE, Donna Stonecipher's second book, is "a seductively paced travelogue--both exotic and erotic--where traveler is lover and tourist, materialist and pilgrim, voyeur and poseur and where the self is bartered in exchange for a glimpse of otherness...[T]he impossible quest for self and other was never so luxurious--the letter home never more admirably adressed"-Martin Corless-Smith. Stonecipher is the author of The Reservoir, which won the 2002 University of Georgia Press Contemporary Poetry Series Competition.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Part travelogue, part exploration of desire, this book-length poem, Stonecipher's sophomore effort, revolves around an intimate address to an unnamed other. Stonecipher (The Reservoir) favors short, sparse couplets, which house often repeating imagery and phrasing. This gives the work a sense of movement and narrative, although one can't help stumbling over the rampant use of double entendres and pseudoerotic language (And I can't wait to get home, sublime/ destination, to kiss you in all the places we know/ the French words for... and all the places we/ don't). The fact that place and person become less important, and indeed less tangible, than the emotional reaction they inspire in the poet, which is explained rather than evoked (can you understand/ the astronomy of my tears?) is the book's largest weakness. Where Stonecipher shines is in her use of the tension between line and syntax, especially when the sonic and imagistic are given equal weight (a mind/ crisscrossed by a captive// tiger eyeing/ the cardinal// points of its/cage). This long poem succeeds in presenting a voice as nostalgic for the desire that was its original impetus as it is for the possibility of return to a geographical place. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
About the Author
Donna Stonecipher is the author of The Reservoir and Souvenir de Constantinople. She grew up in Seattle and Tehran and makes her home both here and abroad.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Provocative Travel Memoir in Poetry Form,
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This review is from: Souvenir De Constantinople (Paperback)
Having finished reading Donna Stonecipher's Souvenir de Constantinople, a beautifully designed book just put out by Instance Press, I admired her lush, sensual language and the exquisite balance Stonecipher maintains between nostalgia and the intellectual, never-quite-satisfied probings of her speaker, who knows all to well about the incomplete fantasy that travel is. I highly recommend this book to both poets and those interested in reading a more language-entranced version of the travel memoir.
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