Wild Goods [Paperback]

Denise Newman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 2008

Poetry. Here is a new collection of poems entitled WILD GOODS by Bay Area poet and translator Denise Newman. "The poems of WILD GOODS 'study' death as text: death being the same as actions/birth/the text/'her,' a 'sandwichtime.' The juncture or 'silent agreement' between these and being in the world is the inside and the outside making each other: 'their silent agreement/will eventually eat container too.' Oneself is turned outside rubbing; while being a silent middle. Pleasurably subtle, frightening, and exciting, in Newman's text one's daily manual labor is 'making a soft object of the world" -Leslie Scalapino.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Denise Newman is a poet and translator living in San Francisco. Her translation of The Painted Room by the Danish poet Inger Christensen was published in the fall of this year by The Harvill Press, U.K. She is the author of two chapbooks, Why Pear? (Em Press) and Of Later Things Yet to Happen (Meow Press). Her poems have appeared in Volt, apex of the M, Chain, and Five Fingers Review, where she is a staff editor. She has been a Djerassi Resident Artist, and she teaches creative writing at the California College of Arts and Crafts and at Mills College.

Product Details

• Paperback: 66 pages
• Publisher: Apogee Press (March 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0978766725
• ISBN-13: 978-0978766726
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4.8 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: #2,832,103 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sin, Punishment, Wisdom, October 14, 2008

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wild Goods (Paperback)

Feisty Bay Area based Apogee Press always strikes me as being sort of attentive to religious matters and I open one of their books as I would enter a sacred cathedral, dipping two fingers into a bowl of holy water and making the sign of the cross before reading. Denise Newman's "Wild Goods" looks very Apogee, with its front and center reproduction of a Holbein portrait, the "Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling" from the National Gallery in London. She's got an enormous squirrel in her lap the size of a Thanksgiving turkey, while the starling is perched perilously close to her ear; lucky thing her skull and the sides of her face are protected by a sort of white woolen over mitt, her cape a white sheet the kind used in an old fashioned barber shop. Flip it over and the blurbs are the kind fellow Florentines used to give Dante as the successive books of the Divine Comedy used to tumble out of the presses. "Wild Goods," it says, in a florid pink script, and I'm rubbing my hands together, just my meat. There's a Dickinsonian paradox right there in the title, as there was in Newman's last book Human Forest, and also in her inspired weave between a primitive, biblical language and the arcanery of modern slang and argot. "The father with only one blessing/ blesses the wrong one--oops" - that "oops" says it all, shows us that the 6th century ways of the "Rules of Saint Benedict" can be amusingly and pointedly adapted to meet the urgent demands of 21st century life.

That's in a single part of a long sequence called, "The Beginning of Perfection," ironically or not, which plays havoc with one's traditional sense of the devotional in multiple ways. Some of the individual poems sport titles but not necessarily in the title's previously privileged place above every line of the poem--these titles might appear five lines into the poem, ten lines into it, even show up after the poem seems to be over. I suppose the effect is to introduce a new--or perhaps an antique--and requisite humility into the poem and to announce that traditional hierarchies have seen their day.

For along with everything else, Newman's books are intensely charged political documents, and WILD GOODS has sharpened her fervor and her bite, as the dream landscapes of our American nightmare grow rank in the night, the shadow of the guillotine everywhere, Warhol's electric chair our emblem of speech, and hers. It is a powerful collection with a knockout punch.