Search results for ""Fence Books""

Prageeta Sharma writes of the experiences of a class-displaced, first-generation Hindoo Romantic, and her landscapes and language follow cannily and whimsically from that position. An exploration of the compatibility of human desire with personal ethics is at the heart of "Infamous Landscapes", whose voices work both with and against a perceived Wordsworthian innocence. In these poems, Sharma turns away from Romanticism with a certain disconcerted, feminine shame, one that finds her peering through an enculturated, gendered lens. The landscapes of these poems are urban and, "natural," in as much as Sharma's third, runs an emotional gamut from fear to fervor in a landscape both external and internal, cast in hysterics and hermeneutics. "Next, I pull down that lonely flag. Why was it waving to you?"

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The role of proper names and their power over both named and namer is a subject Sekiguchi has addressed in her critical work. Now she returns to the theme in these poetic prose blocks. Set in a Portuguese botanical garden, they reconstruct the plant, animal, and aviary worlds through the lens of language - a Wittgensteinian language that dreams of impossible precision while actually constructing a kaleidoscope that interleaves the boundaries of its subjects until the myriad forms that life can assume become a single, triumphant category.

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In French, 'il', the third person masculine singular pronoun, can also have no gender at all: il pleut means 'it's raining'. In Dominique Fourcade's "IL", 'il' means 'it' - but not exactly. Genderless, 'it' is the man-woman, the woman-man - and the place where we are each other. Rather than exploit difference, Fourcade allows the sonority of the word to generate the curious masculine-feminine dialogue we all hear within us, if listening. Full of rich permutations, the resulting poems reveal an enormous resonance within this simple word as well as a zone of peace.

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Ever idiosyncratic, "Fence" evades the tedium of the decade with this anthology, co-edited by all thirteen of Fence's editors, past and present, including founding editor Rebecca Wolff and current coeditor Charles Valle; fiction editors Jonathan Lethem, Ben Marcus, and Lynne Tillman; poetry editors Caroline Crumpacker, Anthony Hawley, Katy Lederer, Matthew Rohrer, Christopher Stackhouse, and Max Winter; and nonfiction editors Frances Richard and Jason Zuzga.In addition to presenting a stunningly eclectic compendium of poetry, short fiction, criticism, and creative nonfiction, much of it by younger writers who appeared in "Fence" at the beginning of careers that went on to be dazzling, this volume includes reflective essays by the editors on their experiences with selected texts, with authors, with the magazine as a collective, and with their own editorial identities, and serves as an indispensable record of the inception and continuation of one of the most influential literary journals of its time.

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The experiences of motherhood are not to be met with silence and/or platitudes. This anthology brings to light the many strong, scary, gorgeous motherhood poems being written right now - poems that address the politics and difficulties and stubborn satisfactions of mothering - while it reminds us of earlier poems that opened the space in which this new work might appear. Motherhood is a universal solvent: Contributors to this anthology come from all over the aesthetic map, and from different states of childgetting - adoption, single parenthood, new mothers, mothers of adults. "Not for Mothers Only" will abolish any comfortable prejudices about what poems on motherhood can or cannot do or say.

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In his second book, Michael Earl Craig blurs the line between the documentary and imaginative impulses. The resulting poems mutilate pastoral myths - a man who has ignored horses his whole life but now wants to try touching one, or two gay donkeys and their uneventful lives on the high plains - but also pay tribute to the current-day West in which this author lives and writes. These poems sketch a slightly dented mental landscape touched by odd details and sharp mood swings, not to mention Junior Mints, Sonny Bono, and the new Pope in Prada sandals. They are superficially light and often comical, and objects frequently take center stage - a new and revered anvil, a black derby "soft as a colt's nose," a series of meticulously described wristwatches - but a social commentary unfurls. Characters in these poems bottom out now and again, dreaming of new or lost worlds, going off on rants or into deep sleeps, wanting desperately "to tell a story with the authority of mallets" but settling for "feeling like a turd washed up on the shore of a quiet lake."

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The poems in Folding Ruler Star are conceived as a value-neutral Paradise Lost. In other words, someone who is not God tells you to avoid a certain tree, and you disobey the instruction; the result is shame. Two characters agree that one of them is supposed to worship and obey the other without actually believing that the other possesses any special qualities that would enforce obedience; the first one disobeys the second one and has to be punished. A body has five parts; each part is alarmed. Descriptions of the parts set off the alarms. Affect lives in the face and is measured with a ruler. The measure is a five-syllable line arranged in three-line units. Each poem is mirrored by another poem with the same title.

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Lines of verse veer top-speed around corners, producing unexpectedly lucid interrogations: "The sun, Then, in a brief Case blown open, Appears. But who is Here to have it, 2Bang4?..." Anger is allowed in these poems, and disillusionment, and a general mistrust of 'landscape' - the natural world owned and used - all countered with the anodyne of an inebriate sensibility that loves the liquor in which it bathes, the language by which it collaborates. "I can co-locate here. I won't digress, not with these. Metal parts in the desert wind. Not with a bank of clouds. Stored on film."

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Winner of the 2005 Alberta Prize. Laura Sims's exquisite debut is the work of an organic synthesizer, one practiced in the restrained art of listening. Her poems exhibit an attenuation that is akin to devotion by means of maxim and miniaturization, she sorts and stacks the products of humanness. Memes and phonemes of a haiku-like fineness are thereby invited to break the surface of the page. Those pre-hung doors of the native state the return to a native, pre-eminent state wholly immanent, wise and wooly.

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Unexpected in this shatteringly attached poetry is the calm speculativeness with which Josie Sigler regards and relates the objects of earthly passion. Family, beasts, sufferers distant and intimate, the earth itself, all are classified in this taxonomy of want, of tragic history and unanswered wish, and strong, strong desire. You can really feel the desire, here, for an end to suffering. That there is plenitude in language, in churchy yet aleatory rhythms of utterance, sets up a tension readers may feel in their bodies, while reading - between the truth of historical penury and the truth of reading such generosity. Two lines from Sappho and partial definitions from Wikipedia and the OED are in each poem funneled into collage, making the many names of loss.

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This is a dazzling third book from a seriously funny poet. In his third book, Ben Doller troubles the blast zone where evolution and manifest destiny collide. Working from primary sources including Captain William Dampier's pirate narratives and the Widow Ching legend (as immortalized by Borges), "Dead Ahead" develops a semi-psychological narrative along the lines of description, variation, embodiment, and pastiche/'piracy'. While Dampier is (in)famous for both his practical and linguistic piracy - stealing words into the English language such as 'barbecue' and 'avocado' - the Widow Ching famously commandeered the pirate fleet of her husband yet ultimately relinquished her power in response to nature's signs and portents. Doller sets about bringing these sources together in a 21st-century collagist text, a critique of language, naturalness, and empowerment. With meditations on common, colonizing objects - such as the porch, the column, and the city - the poems in "Dead Ahead" look straight on at the pleasures of stealing, the perils of travel, and the ends of the earth.

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