Then, Suddenly (Pitt Poetry Series) [Paperback]

Lynn Emanuel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 15, 1999 | Series: Pitt Poetry Series

A reader and a writer don their respective roles and embark on the journey of a book. This is their story--ultimately a love story--darkly funny, mournful, testy. It is about a reader who at times presides over the page like a god, and at others follows the leash of the author's voice through the dark streets of the book like a dog, and it is about a writer of determined slipperiness. As we read, we think that each of us is The Reader, the one who knows the Real Story. But the more we think we understand, the more the story moves away from us-all is not what it seems.

This eagerly awaited third volume by the poet whose work The New York Times described as "at once charmed and frightening" is a book of high-spirited subversiveness, a work of argument, seduction, and a relentless devotion to language. Then, Suddenly-- bristles with the wound of the author's voice--insistent, vital, hilarious, and iconoclastic--tearing away at the confinement of the page and at the distance between the page and the reader. Emanuel's images are dazzling. She creates a performance that is fearsome and funny in its portrayal of the argument between the work of the text and the world of the body. The Gettsburg Review has called her a writer of "exquisite craftsmanship" who can "strike from language . . . images chiseled clean as bas-relief." Then, Suddenly-- is a book of spectacle and verve, part elegy, part vaudeville.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

A determined, smart-alecky poet eyes her reader constantly through this cranky, quirky third collection, sizing us up to the point of exhaustion: "I'm tired of the dark forest of this book/ and the little trail of bread crumbs I have/ to leave so readers.../ can...follow along." Emanuel often has the tone of a teacher who just knows the class won't get her point. She nevertheless varies her lines and her forms adroitly (if conventionally); piles on gorgeous images; celebrates American masters ("Walt, I Salute You!") and mentorsAonly to mockingly renounce narrative, content, emotion (especially emotion) in order to get at a constantly restated goal: "Then, suddenly.../ I am gone, and all that's left is a voice.../ ...gobbling up the landscape,/ an airborne cloud of selfhood giving a poetry reading/ in which, Reader, I have made our paths cross!" To say that such pronouncements sound stiff and a tad ridiculous at this late theoretical date is hardly necessary, especially when Emanuel fails to back them up with splinterings of the self-in-language that ring true. But fans of Deborah Garrison and other chroniclers of the collisons between the bourgeois writing life ("Outwardly, my life is one of irreproachable tedium") and desires for walks on the wild side will appreciate crackly poems like "Dressing the Parts": "So, here we are,/ I am a kind of diction// I can walk around in/ clothed in six-inch heels// of arrogation and scurrility./ And what are you// wearing? Is it those boxer/ things again? I hope it is// those boxer things/ and nothing else." (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

“A determined, smart-alecky poet eyes her reader constantly through this cranky, quirky, third collection, sizing us up . . . she nevertheless varies her lines and her forms adroitly; piles on gorgeous images [and] celebrates masters and mentors.”
--Publishers Weekly

“The poems in Then, Suddenly— require a reader’s willingness to connect the dots of voice and story, and to watch oneself connect the dots, but Emanuel makes the willingness surprisingly easy to give.  She may eschew feeling, but in this she is somewhat ingenuous, rewarding her reader’s attentions throughout with vivid, indeed “moving” metaphors.”
--Boston Review

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press; 1 edition (October 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0822957094
• ISBN-13: 978-0822957096
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 6.2 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,235,499 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the bomb, February 9, 2000

By 

Kevin Canty (Missoula, MT USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Then, Suddenly (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

An amazing book of poems, or a book of amazing poems, or both. The bongo-madness rhythms of the voice linger in your head after you put the book down. Serious without being solemn, playful without being silly. I read this book first time through in a single sitting, and when I was done I knew that I had started somewhere and ended up somewhere else, though the precise names for either place eluded me. A very interesting, very smart, very pleasurable book.

7 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Poet Thinks Too Much, April 20, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Then, Suddenly (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

I saw some wonderful cagy things going on in Emanuel's first two books. But now comes THEN, SUDDENLY, which deconstructs itself word by word as it goes along, and in a very transparent manner. (The everyperson's answer to Jorie Graham will have to wait.) THEN, TO TOP IT ALL OFF the poems are flat. The life seems to have been revised right out of them. "When the reader's radar tracked me down" Emanuel writes. What happened? The answer is, You thought about it too much and the result is stiff, self-conscious poetry.

4 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Book!, March 13, 2000

By 

Michael D. Murphy "whileseated" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Then, Suddenly (Pitt Poetry Series) (Paperback)

"~Glad to see someone else (and Kevin Canty, no less) thinks this book is good. I read the first stanza and immediately knew it was for keeps. It's a book of poems about a book of poems, about an author of a book of poems, about the aboutness of an author making a book of poems."~ happen up front, center stage.