On Tact, & the Made Up World (Kuhl House Poets) [Paperback]

Michele Glazer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 28, 2010 | Series: Kuhl House Poets

Michele Glazer’s poems take on questions of being and value, exploring not just what is, but how it is. The poems trouble borders—between self and other, old and young, sick and well, stranger and intimate; between physical states in processes of decay; and between line and phrase, sentence and interruption, prose and poem, resisting the desire for something irrefutable with an abiding skepticism. 

      The poems are drawn to missteps in perception and in language, those fractures that promise to crack open a surface to yield some other, greater meaning:  “What is looked at is changed / what is looked for is gone.” From this collision of passion and severity come poems that are strange and darkly beautiful.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“These poems seem balanced on the edge of an enormity, desperate to be changed or ‘stained’ by what’s unseen. Continually changing scale, stuttering and beginning again at the border where perspective suddenly turns ‘abstract,’ Michele Glazer’s poems remind me of Elizabeth Bishop’s in their dramatization of the human cost of our need to map and know and understand.”—Thomas Gardner, author, A Door Ajar: Contemporary Writers and Emily Dickinson

“Michele Glazer’s amazing new book takes on the powers and anxieties of transformation, as its subjects emerge from cellular states into systems of complex, interdependent need; as healthy organisms blossom into decay and disintegration; as inarticulable depths of sorrow are syntactically forged into the most natural made thing, the most artificial living being, of all: the true poem. Glazer is cut from no one’s mold, as individual in her powers of attention and feeling as in her stark orneriness, proceeding with cautious immoderation ‘as if sideways was the straightest way.’ This is a work of gorgeous resilience. It reminds me why I need poetry in my life.”—Mark Levine, author, The Wilds

“’I think you see me for nearly what I am,’ writes Michele Glazer, confronting the limits of language and observation with a rare stoicism and steady gaze reminiscent of Elizabeth Bishop. ‘The mind suffers / its margins of attention’ while offering us these consolations: exhilarating visions and re-visions, great beauty where we least expect it, and an encounter with the tensions and sensuality of sound, speech, and syntax. Glazer’s fiercely delicate sensibility renders the seen and unseen world startling and wondrous.”’—Dora Malech, author, Shore Ordered Ocean and Say So

About the Author

Michele Glazer lives in Portland, Oregon, and teaches at Portland State University, where she directs the M.F.A. Program in Creative Writing. Her previous books are It Is Hard to Look at What We Came to Think We’d Come to See and Aggregate of Disturbances (Iowa, 2004).

Product Details

• Paperback: 72 pages
• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press; 1 edition (September 28, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1587299089
• ISBN-13: 978-1587299087
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.9 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,116,126 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)