Uttermost Paradise Place (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize) [Paperback]

Laura McKee (Author), Claudia Keelan (Introduction)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2009 | Series: APR Honickman 1st Book Prize

Winner of the prestigious American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize, Laura McKee’s Uttermost Paradise Place achieves a shimmering transparency and surreal potency. While many of the poems are perceived via a persona, it is ultimately the personae of perception that proscribe the pure pleasure of reading. Committed to the eye and the ear, Uttermost Paradise Place sounds a music of syllables, repetitions, recurrences, and duration. As judge Claudia Keelan writes in her introduction, “Laura McKee creates a poetics of call and response, but not in the traditional sense, as in poet to reader, chorus leader to singers, etc. These poems call to each other, syllable by syllable, and they are so pleased with their circuitry of sound and sense that readers—if they just give themselves away to the pleasure of being exactly nowhere but in the unscripted place all authentic poetry provides—will experience the paradise the book proposes.”

I found a flight suit in the dryer this weekend.
The zippers were hotter than hell when it first emerged
As if it were the machine’s inaugural attempt at creation.
When it fit perfectly, I realized it was perfect.
Suit, I salute you. You have changed my questions.
From now on, “What will I wear?” I will wear the suit.
Never again, “What will I wear?” Those pants.
But what shirt?

Laura McKee earned her MFA from the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle and works at the Cornish College of the Arts.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Laura McKee earned her MFA from the University of Washington. She lives in Seattle and works at Cornish College of the Arts.

Product Details

• Paperback: 96 pages
• Publisher: American Poetry Review (September 1, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0977639576
• ISBN-13: 978-0977639571
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6.8 x 0.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,375,514 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Virginia Woolf meets language poetry and shoots sparklers, October 18, 2009

By 

Elizabeth Aoki "MFA" (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Uttermost Paradise Place (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize) (Paperback)

Uttermost Paradise Place, like all good language poetry, makes use of every word on every line in order to extract the reader's mental quickness and inner ear. Short poems, long poems, alike will make you reconsider where the poem started and where it left you at the end - always aware that every "motion" is an interior one, an abstracted conclusion, a surrealistic surprise.

The closest prose analogies I can come to are the construction of Virginia Woolf's sentences, which surprised her peers and modern-day writers with the ability to hang so much mental motion on lengthy gramattical structures, and oddly enough Terry Prachett's L-space, where words take on more heft and warp the nature of the universe. Each word in a McKee poem insists on its own existence, and when it locks into the whole of the line, creates a different perceptual slice of what we think is going on.

For example, take "The Last Wall is a Strange Cool Puzzle" where she writes:

"...Sherlock, hold the vial/ thought up to the light, not the social shattering easy sound/next door and then laughter,not fingerprints or happiness but love/ of love, absence, inscrutable center of a stone..."

We begin thinking of a physical wall,and she tells us about the mason. But by the time you read the lines above, your idea of what the wall is - and where the love of love contains, is or is going - continues to shift. Interestingly, hell as a concept or a place of redemption is a continuous subtext of this book, belied by its (euphemistic?) title that implies the complete opposite.

If you like language, puzzles, nuances, metaphoric shifts, and perception madly walking, then you will like Uttermost Paradise Place.

4.0 out of 5 stars poems of a misfit in existence, September 21, 2009

By 

Henry Berry "Henry Berry" (Southport, CT) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Uttermost Paradise Place (APR Honickman 1st Book Prize) (Paperback)

McKee's poems are like a madcap scene. Sometimes she tricks out the comedy of one. But she's not so much concerned with farce as the knowledge of the tentativeness and autonomy of things and situations and of one being thrown off kilter by this. "The surfaces are wrong," the poet tells the reader in the opening of "Sun On One." In most of the poems though McKee goes beyond such simple declarations to show the reader how wrong." In "Death of a Blue Vase," "The little lead soldiers from a former time creep up to the window/in ranks and report: it was the blinding sun-/light, clouds too racing past./Once the ladder was secured upright to the bed/the truck sped north to a superfluous question/interrupts a magic truck." Time and different levels or dimensions (suggested by "ladder"), incongruence, and the artifice of magic all come together." Even Heaven itself is a madcap scene: "Paradise is on the floor above us...we can hear the participants/moving furniture around...It sounds like no one is in charge./Chairs gouging the floor. Collisions. Very little coordination/in general... (from Glacier 4).

This is not surrealism because it is not meant to--nor does it in fact--represent the illogic or meanings of dreams or the subconscious. McKee craftily deals with the situation known as existence.