Unraveling at the Name [Paperback]

Jenny Factor (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 2002

This startling debut packages eros, motherhood, divorce, and a lesbian choice into a first book that knows that the narrative of transformation ultimately transcends the specific circumstances of the journey. In selecting Unravelling at the Name, Marilyn Hacker wrote: "Here is a new voice accomplished both in mind and music, a poet with perfect pitch in her mother tongue."

Jenny Factor received her A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in 1991, and her M.F.A. from Bennington College.

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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In probing "Unstable Singularities," keeping a "Rendezvous in Greenwich" or contemplating "A High Cold Bright Full Moon," Jenny Factor's speaker in Unraveling at the Name finds "Our sexuality takes form only after some interpreting." In 37 formal lyrics (some in multiple, time-shifting parts), that maxim is full borne out, as marriage, motherhood, the past, various sex acts and varying complexions come under scrutiny. While a voice warns that "a marriage and the stiff form of all heterosexual culture will fall on you like starch," Factor's speaker cheerfully executes "orgiastic shifts in key."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Jenny Factor, recipient of the 2001 Hayden Carruth Award, has worked as a contract archeologist, a freelance writer and editor, and is a regular contributor to bLink Magazine (EarthLink's member magazine). She received her A.B. summa cum laude from Harvard and Radcliffe Colleges in 1991, and her M.F.A. from the Bennington College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press (May 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1556591764
• ISBN-13: 978-1556591761
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #618,509 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars poems of formal grace and beauty, August 21, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Unraveling at the Name (Paperback)

This is a *perfect* first book -- tight, thoughtful, eloquent. Jenny Factor creates a poetry-novella. Her speaker redefines herself and in the process meditates on the nature of shapes and transformation in poems that are carefully shaped and transforming. The book is also, unexpectedly fun and naughty. Personable and smart. And a quick read. Bravely anchored in the gritty stuff but hinged to the tranforming moment. Like folk song. Zen meditation. Or a pulp novel. Factor turns over the raw facts of sexual awakening, each time with shifting nuances and emphases.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars singing the stories history hides, November 3, 2002

By 

Reginald Shepherd (Pensacola, FL USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Unraveling at the Name (Paperback)

Jenny Factor's often deceptively casual poems wear their prosodic mastery lightly, combining formal fluency and personal urgency, fulfilling a will to make form out of feeling: "This life I've written out and can control." Unraveling at the Name revolves, unravels even, around a remarkable set of skewed sonnet sequences about love requited and un- (and love's various alibis and substitutes), desire and sex and their often awkward relationship (what Factor calls the "urgency of appetite"), marriage, coming out and learning to come, lesbian motherhood, and loneliness. A canzone about fisting informs us that "Forms/binds. Form combines. Form liberates," and this book demonstrates the ways in which all of these propositions can be true, simultaneously and in turn. "My story's underneath this history./Turn off the radio. I want to sing," Factor writes, and sing she does.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Poems of 'self', August 18, 2002

By 

Alyssa A. Lappen (Earth) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Unraveling at the Name (Paperback)

I really wanted to like this book. It contains a few magic moments, and the poet unquestionably demonstrates agility and skill within these formal works.

But overall, the poems were a disappointment. They don't live up to the famous Rabbi Akiba epigraph, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?/ If I am only for myself, who am I?/ If not now, when?"

It's a risky venture, exposing deeply personal discoveries to the public.

Unfortunately the risks taken here never break out of a vapid self-centeredness into the universal language that all poetry seeks and successful poetry attains. Skip it. Alyssa A. Lappen