Tokyo Butter: Poems [Hardcover]

Thylias Moss (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 15, 2006

From the acclaimed, award-winning poet, this new collection is a gripping search for life and truth.

From Thylias Moss, one of America's most innovative poets, comes Tokyo Butter, perhaps her most innovative book to date. Inventing new poetics as she goes, Moss applies her exhilarating capacity for language to a synthesis of the personal, the historical, and the cultural. She searches searches for vestiges of Deirdre, a beloved cousin who has left the living; for hints of Cindy Song, a college student missing since 2001; and for manifestations of her true self in the archaic wings of science.

Moss' imagination is, as always, ravenous, interrogative—but in Tokyo Butter there is an urgency amidst the jagged, beautiful verse that has become her trademark.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

This eighth outing from MacArthur "genius" grant winner Moss (Slave Moth, 2004) is her most ambitious. Loosely organized around the idea of missing persons—Moss's friend Deirdre, dead in Italy; an abducted child named Cindy Song—these extended, long-lined, energetically digressive poems yearn to connect everything to everything else: "any surface revealed by delving is the outside/ of something also a gate and trapdoor." Carnival games of whack-a-mole, older women's wombs, space stations, dinosaur excavations and bioluminescent cabbage come together on a single page. African-American experience provides just one strand of what Moss calls her Limited Fork Poetics, her way of including everything: modes of inquiry proper to geology, biology, geography, physiology, theology and blasphemy all get extended hearings. Her title stands for the slippery nourishment of figurative language itself: "Peanut butter is a tributary of the Butter Nile fanning out." The long central poem "Deirdre: A Search Engine" includes contrapuntal moments of flat grief, of welcome understatement: "we say she's up there, but we go to the cemetery"; "without her being there, nothing is the way she would have wanted it." This anchor piece gives heft and clarity to what might otherwise feel overwhelming, establishing Moss as a creator with an unmistakable mind. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Moss is a highly original poet of amplitude and verve, her poems at once cerebral and sensual. Circling the mystery of absence in her newest brimming collection--the disappearance of a stranger named Cindy Song and the death of her beloved cousin, Deirdre--Moss juggles a set of metamorphosing motifs to create breathtaking, funny, and scathing riffs on natural processes and human practices. Snow, glass, eggs, accidents, decay, mutations, saving face, head scarves, funnel cake, chromosomes, fruits, and flowers all inspire kinetic collages, with butter serving as a strange and poignant unifying substance. It is in "DEIDRE: A SEARCH ENGINE" that Moss' modus operandi comes clear. She is emulating a "Google odyssey," rendering lyrical the odd juxtapositions and eureka moments of Internet searching. But so organically ordered and so complex and hybridized are the shape-shifting, morally ordered mindscapes Moss engineers that they possess not a techno aura but, rather, a Hieronymus Bosch-like surrealism. "To live is to embrace the danger of rapture," writes Moss, and the same can be said of reading this fascinating and demanding creation. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 112 pages
• Publisher: Persea (December 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0892553197
• ISBN-13: 978-0892553198
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #990,471 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A work of utmost sincerity, January 4, 2007

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Tokyo Butter: Poems (Hardcover)

Whiting Writer's Award-winning author and professor of poetics (University of Michigan) Thylias Moss presents Tokyo Butter, a free-verse compilation of poetry written to help make sense of the death of her beloved cousin and friend, Deirdre. Tokyo Butter is far from an elegy or a memorial; reaching beyond traditional limitations, it seeks remnants of Deirdre's life, passion, and essence in news stories, arcane tidbits of science, balloon warfare, and Internet search engines, among other places. A work of utmost sincerity about the resonating impressions of humanity, Tokyo Butter is a one-of-a-kind tribute to character and genius. "The Culture of Reena and the Bear (Before the Bear: derived from a theory of gravy)": (The neckline and hem of Reena's gown / were trimmed with real hummingbirds / [just a few tiny pins in the outspread wings / - she could feel the racing unison / that the tiny hearts fell into] and actual orchids. / The beak closest to it tried to extract nectar / from the small cleft - the suprasternal notch - / at the bottom of her perfumed throat) // (Bees drew near; live jewels from the garden.)