Zone : Zero (New Series) [Paperback]

Stephanie Strickland (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 30, 2008 | Series: New Series (Book 24)

Stephanie Strickland's new book includes an interactive C D with two sequences from the book in digital form: "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot" and "slippingglimpse."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In her fifth collection, Strickland (V: WaveSon.nets) continues her investigatory hypertext antics, challenging readers with poem sequences refracted through conceptual use of the page and expansive reading of social and scientific histories. These poems swell with allusion and quotation, capturing the paradox of our contemporary moment's clipped attention span and obsession with information. We find Lot's wife and Patti Smith on facing pages; "the Half-Life and Quake game engines" in close proximity to Desert Shield; and the 32-page "Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot," an enigmatic pairing of characters and their pun-filled adventures ("Sand panned speed. Languid was she. Oh seeming fast, fine foil for/ de... lay"). Strickland's poems have an impressive sonic range, from the quotidian and subdued ("who can open/ who can/ hold it/ constant/ quiet") to the unbridled ("a disaster a pilaster and a jailmeister play/ pool.littlegreen willytadpoles//jasper"). Occasionally, Strickland's copious notes are more intriguing than the poems' elaborate structural elements; this is due in part, no doubt, to Strickland's attempt to squeeze work originally designed to take advantage of the bells and whistles of the computer screen into the confines of the page, a problem the accompanying CD, with digital versions of two of the book's sequences, attempts to solve. (Sept.)
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Review

"Stephanie Strickland is one of contemporary poetry's polymaths: her poetry displays an astonishing command of scientific knowledge--for instance Kurt Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem--technical know-how, especially in the realm of electronic poetics, and unusual verbal virtuosity. The pièce de résistance in Zone : Zero is the interactive generative Flash poem 'slippingglimpse,' in which text and video, made by using motion capture coding, combine so as to create a genuinely new and distinctive eco-poetry. Readers/viewers will find themselves totally mesmerized." --Marjorie Perloff

" '. . . mystic immersion / enabled / smite embedding / enabled,' writes Stephanie Strickland as she launches us into the mysteries of her interior castle, her Zone : Zero. With her extraordinary ear, her crackerjack sense of timing, her genius for structure and her exquisitely dry wit (as in the delicious vaudeville routines of her 'Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot'), Strickland can lead us down these high stone stairs, through these neurodigital pathways and never lose us, even into her castle keep. And when we find ourselves there, what fierce playfulness awaits us, and what startling pleasures, pleasures indivisible from the victories they embody: "And Colette took up this / bread, which was black, / and spat back at Lord Death / the red /pomegranate drops.' " --Rachel Loden

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Product Details

• Paperback: 120 pages
• Publisher: Ahsahta Press; Pap/Com edition (September 30, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1934103012
• ISBN-13: 978-1934103012
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,431,112 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Zone: Zero, July 1, 2009

By 

Isabelle Jolly (El Segundo, CA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Zone : Zero (New Series) (Paperback)

This was a gift for a relative, who raved about it. He was very happy with it.

5.0 out of 5 stars poetry brain expando, October 30, 2008

By 

T. Svoboda (nyc, ny USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Zone : Zero (New Series) (Paperback)

What a lot of fabulous word/brain play Stephanie Strickland gives readers in her new Zone:Zero, especially in the long "Ballad of Sand ("silly con") and Harry Soot" ("Harry Soot in a seersucker suit") with its "scar arroyos, worry/furrows, wry sag"--Wow. This is the first of two poems ("slippingglimpse" also) that branches on the computer for varied and various readings. The book opens with "Constant Quiet," a seemingly-sprawled poem about control, and then "20/21 Vision" as centered to the eyes as its topic might suggest. "War Day" and "slippingglimpse" are two "boxed" poems, dazzling variations on the Anglo-Saxon double stanzas. If you're not conversant with contemporary techtalk or the Incompleteness Theorem, you might want to peruse the extensive and fascinating footnotes first as many poems celebrate the brain, artificial and otherwise: "A fact//is a failure of two things to be identical." (from " The Interior Castle"). The only time the personal is invoked is in the mention of a daughter in "Sierra Madre," illuminating the entire "Absinthe" series that comes before it. Strickland doesn't flinch from finger wagging at the greats: "they take suffering and make it/dangle" in "At Auden's Museum." Nor does she neglect the elegy: read "Prisoner in the Cave" and beat on your bars.