Wild One [Paperback]

Lucille Lang Day (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 2000

Poetry. Lucille Lang Day is a jack-of-all-trades and her multitude of talents and interests shines through in her new collection of poetry, WILD ONE. "No one writes poems quite like Lucille Day's sharp-edged, witty, ironic poems; laugh-out-loud funny poems; startling, disquieting, slightly sinister poems; gorgeously wrought, lyrical poems. With unique combination of gifts--including the precision of a mathematician, a botanist's powers of observation, the memoirist's eye for the critical detail--Day captures the moment midair and pins it to the page. WILD ONE is a wonderful collection of those moments"--Maria Falk.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Confessional poetry too easily collapses into self-exploitation and too rarely approaches universality. But Day's generous collection is that rara avis, the successful, indeed gripping, autobiography in verse. Tight, almost balladlike, unrhymed stanzas distinguish it from looser free verse while allowing Day the spontaneity for which free verse is often preferred. Beginning with her young adulthood, filled with violence and loss, Day engages us in her struggle to wrest meaning out of tragedy and willful mistakes. As the title imparts, she was a "wild one" in a society that punished wildness in women. It is part of Day's specialness that she neither glamorizes nor rejects her wild younger self but instead offers the awesome complexity of that self. She also gives us access to the regret-tinged, though gratefully received, peace of her later years in this involving, honest, and admirable book. Patricia Monaghan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

Day writes eloquently about our engagements with the physical world, celebrating our earthly existence. -- Toni Mirosevich, author of THE ROOMS WE MAKE OUR OWN

Few books of poems have the sheer narrative intensity of Lucille Day's WILD ONE. -- Dana Gioia, author of CAN POETRY MATTER?

No one writes poems quite like Lucille Day's... WILD ONE is a wonderful collection of those moments. -- Marcia Falk, author of THE BOOK OF BLESSINGS

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 100 pages
• Publisher: Scarlet Tanager Books (June 1, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0967022436
• ISBN-13: 978-0967022437
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 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: #4,708,390 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Lucille Lang Day is the author of a children's book, Chain Letter (Heyday), and eight poetry collections and chapbooks, including The Curvature of Blue (Cervena Barva) and Self-Portrait with Hand Microscope (BPW&P), which received the Joseph Henry Jackson Award in Literature. She also co-authored a textbook, How to Encourage Girls in Math and Science (Dale Seymour). She received her M.A. in English and M.F.A. in creative writing at San Francisco State University, and her M.A. in zoology and Ph.D. in science and mathematics education at the University of California at Berkeley. The founder and director of a small press, Scarlet Tanager Books, she also served for 17 years as the director of the Hall of Health, an interactive children's museum in Berkeley.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lucille Lang Day's "Wild" Life, July 30, 2001

By 

Jack. Foley (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wild One (Paperback)

Lucille Lang Day's "Wild One" is a wonderful, frequently hilarious exploration of the life of a woman who refuses to let the world dictate to her. This "autobiography in verse" traces the poet's life from 1954 to the present. Married and pregnant at fourteen, Day shoplifts, quits school, undergoes various encounters with men, marries two more times (twice to the same man), goes back to school, has two daughters, an abortion, experiences severe depression, takes LSD, converts to Judaism, tries out different ways of dealing with the world. A woman, she tells her daughter, "is born twice": "the first / person she gives birth to / is herself." But the self is continually changing. Day's book documents a constantly expanding awareness of the world in which she functions. Finally, she will be satisfied by nothing less than the universe itself. "Wild One" is not so much a book about "coming-of-age" as it is a book about a confusing, tumultuous life which both amuses and baffles the author. Day seems constantly to be asking, "Why ever did I do that?" One of its great strengths is her keen awareness of paradox and contradiction. Even at thirteen, she knew that "bad" seemed "good." "Wild One" is like one of the answers Day fantasizes giving to her Ph.D. qualifying exam: "We want," she writes, "to map the cobwebby brain"; "The universe folds on itself." Probing, wondering, testing, "folding on themselves," her poems do the same thing.