Description
Book Synopsis"[Wolff's poems] are stylistic and tonal shapeshifters. Hip, contemplative, and dark and resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive, they're unnerving, funny, and occasionally subversive."-Bookforum Poet, novelist, and Fence Books founder Rebecca Wolff's internal monologue made external in poetry is uncanny. Her musical and darkly funny fourth collection, One Morning-, spans language, culture, art history, love, passion, grief, consumerism, environmental devastation, and the ekphrastic experience of pop and high culture. She experiments with torque, energy, narrative-two steps ahead of herself with the reader on her heels. From "Today Is a Good Day to Fly (Life Begins at)": I'm really digging this blue sky after so much rain with my regular menstrual cycle my Def Jam progesterone cream the blow-in (in my pocket) (ripped out) from in-flight music magazine "touching cloth" like the Romantics do. Insert jitney. Rebecca Wolff is the author of four collections of poetry, one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose. Her first book, Manderley, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky. Her second, Figment, was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Claudia Rankine and Eavan Boland. Her third, The King, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. Her novel The Beginners was published by Riverhead in 2011. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1998, Wolff founded the influential literary journal Fence; in 2001 she founded Fence Books and launched The Constant Critic website. Wolff lives in Hudson, New York, and is currently a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.
Trade ReviewIn her fourth collection, Wolff hits with constant flashes of humor and revelation in poems as tightly controlled as they are varied. [Its] wide range is one of the collection's finest qualities, with poems conjuring music out of fragmentation, narrative prose, rapid repetition, simple lyric imagery, and unexpected syntax. --Publishers Weekly Hers is a world desiring transfiguration, the renewal of harmonic convergence of self and outside-self. In this, [Wolff] is a romantic revolutionary, an exemplary detour from the dichotomous categorization of poets as being either experimental or lyrical. Yes, Wolff's work affirms, you can have it both ways and in fact be both. --Jon Curley, Hyperallergic
Table of ContentsI Arcadia (et in . . . est) One morning— The Reductions Seeming inevitability Retreat from Likeness Ekphrastic From Where I’m Situated Ecco Ekphrastic Stockholder II Let’s consider this a Palisades How Spooky Is It Man Tits Tuck In, Vermont Buncha Corporate Trash Bumper Sticker Mad as Hell/Not Going To Take It Abs Short Sight I approach a purchase Greed You Cannot Think About (Sneaking Sally through the Alley) Antiques Roadshow (Nounz 2 Verbz) Use Objects: Boise Art Museum 2009 GDP Applies to Apple Fronting The Ungovernable III The Curious Life and Mysterious Death of Peter J. Perry IV Admit No Impediment A million metaphors Poor Mr. Rochester Master Mind Church on the Hill The Things That I Do What happened Everpresence Parkeresque Let Your Secrets Die with Me Moon, June You’re the smartest cat I know Homeowner Warden Romance V Dark Roads It was while watching Jane Eyre Irony is the salt of life (I’d trade it in for gold) Today Is A Good Day to Fly (Life Begins at) Ian Curtis An authorized biography of (little) JA Remains And when I say poem windowless structure Am I Special Rhythm “and” the Human Body The Nightingale (sound of music) VI Visions of Never Being Heard from Again What are they doing here The Social Unfailingly Poetics Department: A Mockery In The You’d have had to have had Acknowledgements
