Description
Book SynopsisA much anticipated third collection with poems mourning a mother figure, as well as recently deceased cultural icons. Praise for Kathleen Ossip: Ossip conjures delightful and unexpected muses
shrewd and ambitious.” New York Times Book Review "The Do-Over, Ossip’s third collection, is a lyrical, open-ended, meta-leaning meditation on the subject of death
.[A]n exquisite cocktail of displacement, minutiae, and metapoetic introspection." Boston Review The biggest surprise in poetry for 2011 is this second book by Kathleen Ossip. It’s got everything one could wish for in a new collection of poems. . . . It’s just beautiful. And terrifying.” Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2011 The poet has an uncanny ability to convey what it actually feels like to be alive today
Ossip is one of our foremost ethnographers of contemporary unreality.” The Believer How do you stay in heaven?” Ossip asks, Is it a kind of sophisticated rewind?” Her third collection of poems is haunted by the idea of rewind,’ and especially by the teasing possibility that we, toolike the moon, like a plantmay be granted cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The book's overarching narrative is the death of the poet’s stepmother-in-law, a cherished, loving, eccentric woman who returns to its pages again and again. But in spite of its focused grief and ontological urgency, The Do-Over is a varied collectionshort acrostics mourn recently dead cultural icons (Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Donna Summer); there's an ode to an anonymous Chinese factory worker, three true stories” that read like anecdotes told over drinks, and more. The Do-Over is an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure, a fragmented portrait of its difficult, much loved subject. It's also a snapshot of our death-obsessed, death-denying cultural moment, which in Ossip's gifted hands turns out to be tremulous, skeptical, unsure of ultimate values and, increasingly, driven to find them. I am still studying, aren’t you?” she begins. Readers will eagerly embrace the surprise, humor, and seriousness of her quest.
Trade Review"Working in acrostics, chain verse, prose, couplets, quatrains, Ossip's a magpie who pilfers from magpies....[S]he has an eye for 'the light of the culture: gold and misleading' and an ear that saves her wisdom moments from bluntness: 'I see the forest, I see the trees. / What I can't see is the / dappled clearing I'm standing on.' And then she devastates you by removing a single letter from a common poetic word: 'In the clearing, the now is falling.'" The Chicago Tribune "It may be the case that Ossip understands the elasticity and capaciousness of contemporary poetry better than anybody. . . . This is our book." NPR "In as much as it makes sense to talk about writing as perfect, The Do-Over is not, nor does it mean to be. But it is remarkable: unusually alive, intelligent and alert; unusually imaginative in its ways of letting the now fall into poems that find more invitations in impermanence than any others I’ve read recently." Slate "This supremely protean, dexterous poet focuses her reader’s attention on the hinges between the physical and metaphysical, on the reinvention of narrative and metaphor.... Ossip suggests that we let grief enliven us, shake up our language, darken our metaphors, and tear us awake." Harvard Review Unassuming and masterfully crafted, Ossip’s poetry is sneaky, very often disguising itself as easy and surprising you the moment you let your guard down. . . . The Do-Over is a kind of elegy to contemporary culture: it critiques modern life while basking in its ever-younger, glitzier rabble." The Paris Review "Each of Ossip’s acrostics shows her to be a master of compression, whereas the longer, serial prose-verse poems demonstrate her ability to build longer structures without sacrificing density of language.” The Brooklyn Rail
"Working in acrostics, chain verse, prose, couplets, quatrains, Ossip's a magpie who pilfers from magpies....[S]he has an eye for 'the light of the culture: gold and misleading' and an ear that saves her wisdom moments from bluntness: 'I see the forest, I see the trees. / What I can't see is the / dappled clearing I'm standing on.' And then she devastates you by removing a single letter from a common poetic word: 'In the clearing, the now is falling.'" —The Chicago Tribune "It may be the case that Ossip understands the elasticity and capaciousness of contemporary poetry better than anybody. . . . This is our book." —NPR "In as much as it makes sense to talk about writing as perfect, The Do-Over is not, nor does it mean to be. But it is remarkable: unusually alive, intelligent and alert; unusually imaginative in its ways of letting the now fall into poems that find more invitations in impermanence than any others I’ve read recently." —Slate "This supremely protean, dexterous poet focuses her reader’s attention on the hinges between the physical and metaphysical, on the reinvention of narrative and metaphor.... Ossip suggests that we let grief enliven us, shake up our language, darken our metaphors, and tear us awake." —Harvard Review “Unassuming and masterfully crafted, Ossip’s poetry is sneaky, very often disguising itself as easy and surprising you the moment you let your guard down. . . . The Do-Over is a kind of elegy to contemporary culture: it critiques modern life while basking in its ever-younger, glitzier rabble." —The Paris Review "Each of Ossip’s acrostics shows her to be a master of compression, whereas the longer, serial prose-verse poems demonstrate her ability to build longer structures without sacrificing density of language.” —The Brooklyn Rail
Table of Contents1 A. in May / 8 Mothers Day / 9 “I’m afraid of death” / 10 Ode / 11 The Road Trip and the Apron String / 15 Lyric / 16 2 Ghost Moon / 28 How can we know the journey from the path? / 29 On Political Crisis / 31 The Great Man is dead, / 32 It’s hard to keep identities / 33 Veterans Day / 34 Amy Winehouse / 35 Steve Jobs / 36 Troy Davis / 37 Lucian Freud, / 38 Donna Summer / 39 Three True Stories / 40 The Millipede / 41 3 A. in January / 44 What is A. / 45 What is Death / 46 Sonnet for A. / 53 Libraries & Museums / 54 4 “No use” / 56 Three Short Lyrics / 58 After / 59 5 On Sadness / 73 The Do-Over / 74 Tool Moan / 75 Words for a Newborn / 76 The Arrival of Spring / 78 Funeral of My Character / 81 One Short Lyric / 82 Oh, wow, mausoleums, / 83
