Voice-Over [Paperback]

Angie Estes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 2002

Angie Estes' VOICE-OVER explores the erotics of language and its meanings in poems both experimental and lyric. Reginald Shepherd, in awarding the collection the 2001 Alice Fay Di Castagnola prize, wrote that Estes' poems "enact the aural and thematic embodiment of letters and syllables, in which enunciation is a form of annunciation, and word play is serious work indeed."

"Angie Estes' stunning new collection of poems is a brilliant and intellectually dazzling investigation of the often unstable relationship between language and experience. These heart-breaking and inventive poems negotiate the oscillations of event and memory in order to reveal the delicate and highly filigreed interweaving--in our lives--of action, meditation, and utterance. Beauty and insight spill off every page of this rich, compelling, and essential new book of poetry." --David St. John

"Angie Estes takes very alert art and wakes it up all over again. Out of wonderful sliding sound relationships and torqued-up rhythms, out of histories as vivid as they are diverse, she creates a present moment in which we realize that Giotto and Le Corbusier are, and have always been, contemporaries--OUR contemporaries--for great art always happens in the present, and Estes' work is no exception. It's now." --Cole Swensen

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Angie Estes is also the author of THE USES OF PASSION, winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Award. She is currently a visiting professor at The Ohio State University.

Product Details

• Paperback: 73 pages
• Publisher: Oberlin College Press (April 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0932440916
• ISBN-13: 978-0932440914
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.4 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: #2,418,860 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Elegant Collection, July 30, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Voice-Over (Paperback)

If you delight in language that is at once absolutely clear and playfully enigmatic and if you think that poetry should speak to us of the shape of our perceptions, the cadence of our own voices, the thrill of a fresh and breathing world, you will love this work. This collection delights in the way that a book of pictures from some land you have never visited might. The poems are evocative and fresh, conveying a sense of a world that invites us to visit.

While Estes's subjects may seem intellectually challenging--Giotto and Le Corbusier, for example--her approach to those subjects is inveterately human, humble, and sometimes even joyfully irreverent. She plays with words in the most delightful and delighted manner, and she handles irony with sweetness and joy rather than using it to cudgel or distance her reader.
Every word is chosen with such care, every motif with such attention, that by the end of each poem, we feel as though we have listened to the most well wrought and lyrical song of Schubert.

I very strongly recommend Estes's collection. It is a joy to read, and its echoes will remain in your memory long after you close this book.