Search results for ""fence books""

From ambivalent animals thriving after Katrina to party chants echoing in a burning city, this collection troubles rubble, cobbling a kind of life.

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"The Method" is a manuscript of theorems and proofs written and diagrammed by the mathematician Archimedes at Constantinople in the second half of the tenth century. "The Method" is a book of poems by Sasha Steensen. The former "The Method" is a text that has survived, at least in parts, through a series of processes that includes palimpsesting - the dismantling/reassembling and subsequent overwriting of text-thievery, obscurantism, acquisition, and conservation.The latter text takes the former and its history, which has been invisible, overwritten, and requisitioned for use value, as a jumping-off place for her own meditation on the relationships that develop between a person and her historical truth, a person and her writings. Steensen's "The Method" treads carefully in the terrain of fact that foregrounds her investigations, and emerges centuries and centuries on in the only moment that remains to us. "I thought: The Method, so happily recovered. I am the one who called us all together. I driven time. I wars and waves. I was. I go over sea-lanes rife with fish. I did not. I saw a shadow on the water. I know this situation makes a perfect poem, but I will not."

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With the kind of largesse one might expect from a young mind fueled by coffee and tobacco and bent on an exploration of consciousness, one premised on the rat's brain as a mnemonic device and a mimetic structure for that which we see and know, Christopher Janke stops at nothing, not even the end of a line of verse, in the expression of foment. Ideas, relationships, and images achieve maximum potency in these disjunctive, sequential meditations; one is tempted to invoke the name of Walt, the yawp, to describe their nearness and their mess. Wide, sympathetic, and at times goofy in the service of their largest aims, these paragraphs attempt nothing less than sufficiency. "what grand consolation, what balm, what succor, what support, what solace in the air and of the air or in the knowledge of air or in a forced confrontation with air - or in the way I feel with other legs around me on the grass in the afternoon or in the hurling towards a something unknown or in asking why a need to console."

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An exuberant skeptic, Elizabeth Marie Young writes in the infidel hope that writing itself can create worlds. These hilariously erudite prose poems are cosmologies - miniature, ever-expanding universes crammed with over-active particulars. They are interactive environments, kaleidoscopic and incorrigibly changeable, in which competing impulses toward cerebral austerity and luxuriant beauty battle it out. These poems crystallize into radiant geometries even as they threaten to self-destruct: distinctly utopian, pulsing with the defiant exuberance of drag and disco and steeped in the lemonade oceans of Charles Fourier. Antiquity lingers as a locus of incomprehensibility, startling us into novelty. Elizabeth Marie Young coins new myths, drawing in classical material only to see how it looks wrestling in the mud with surfers, yogis, and cyborgs.

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With her third collection, Catherine Wagner assumes a mantle of responsibility. Each opportunity for productivity is a personal call-out; she responds, 'diligent and strict'. A repetitive stretching exercise produces sectional meditations on obedience to self, and to ambition, and the limitations of the body as container, while the obligation to include others in one's apprehension of the room, or self, causes Wagner's slangy, spoken, and singing world of representation to slide from syntactic unit to unit, making room for a galaxy of metonymy. 'Things mean, and I can't tell them not to'. What's going on inside is a watchful self-regard that invites Eros to play. Further exploration takes Wagner close into sexual fantasy - the desire for a debased object - and the politics thereof: 'Well I expect you to go into the/fucking human tunnel/I'm going'. Here, we find a female body marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.

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With her debut collection, "Unspoiled Air", Kaisa Ullsvik Miller affirms the reader's perhaps heretofore unrecognized need for a gentle and daily massaging of profanely innocuous, even corporate language into deliverable spiritual meaning. This is a need that, once identified, becomes acute: we need to hear, for example, that "to create a deficiency or incompleteness in unique talents and abilities/increase talents available for creating together. This is a partnership. 'Ullsvik Miller's radical patience with received truism allows for these paradoxically indispensable communiques to be communicated: to provide for our needs, to protect us from dangerous destructive inconveniences we encounter - red waves - the form of feelings. We wander through our own guidance...' In this work pronouns and referential infrastructure are blurred, allowing that feeling of incompleteness that is necessary for fresh perception. Thus communal bonds are made readily available.

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This is a youthful book, as its title implies, in as much as rock n' roll belongs yet to the young. Its debut concerns are those of the youth culture in as much as when we are young we are closer to home, to origin, to the primal disjunctions supplied by our gaps/leaps in understanding. Huffman's poems enact a sweet mojo on the youthful territory of the hometown, of the high school, of the TV-watching-music-listening experience. A series of sporadically appearing poems with the title "Very Early in the Life of Jerome" acts as a placeholder in the reading mind for these territories, enacted as they are in the comfortable vernacular of immediate, casual speech: "When I am fourteen on the diving board, please start by saying I am fifteen and deny you were ever there." Other poems allow for a steeper climb on the merry-go-round of associative logic, by which we are given to understand this poet's effortless commitment to literary surfaces.

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"Swallows" draws on the various metaphorical implications of the House in its exploration of the uncanny presence and absence of self and world in poetry. From poems concerned with the eighteenth-century inquiry into the whereabouts of Horace's "Sabine Villa" - a search determined to locate an actual physical site behind Horace's celebrated verse - to poems in the final section transcribed from the walls of a house, these poems acknowledge the desire for the presence of the physical in the written, while understanding the necessary distance between writing and the world. Throughout the book, swallows act as a kind of genius loci: presences that arrive and depart continually.

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This collection of poems by Elizabeth Robinson circles around and around the place of the individual in relation to an other or Other or others. If human experience is nested in relation, "the braid of bodies that engendered this self," it is also disrupted by "an intimacy that can disassemble and recreate itself" until an uneasy form of empathy emerges from the radical isolation of human introspection:I would be you, the self at a loss. The invisible hand that rests on the shoulder of its own body, guiding it. We do not know what comfort is.Using prose poems to suggest the narrative logic of the story, "The Orphan and Its Relations" takes references from domestic life, myth and folktales, and artworks "to bridge," as Robert Creeley said elsewhere of Robinson's work, "between the physically given world and that other we gloss with words, yet apprehend insistently as the defining presence of our lives themselves."

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Cast as a dialogue among six interlocuters, this lyric blend of poetry and prose considers light from a variety of perspectives - philosophical, physical, ethical, and metaphorical.

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What has industrial slaughter got to do with poetry? "The Cow" performs an autopsy of the twentieth century on the bodies of ruined women, ransacking texts from the Bible to "Baudelaire" and "The Merck Veterinary Manual". It is hopeless, sexual, scarified, and alive. "No doubt about it, this is strong and original work. Scary in the best possible way." - Richard Foreman.

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"I like being in the world of Craig's poems. Anything can happen, and probably will, and it will affect me in small or large ways that I couldn't have imagined. The precision of their imagery keeps me reeling with delight."--James Tate Thin Kimono continues Michael Earl Craig's singular breed of brilliant absurdist poetry, utterly and masterfully slanting the realities of daily existence. Michael Earl Craig is the author of two previous collections of poetry: Yes, Master (Fence Books, 2006) and Can You Relax in My House (Fence Books, 2002). He lives in Livingston, Montana, where he is a certified journeyman farrier.

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"One of the most unusual and persuasive books of poems I’ve read in some time."—Dwight Garner, New York Times“In a flurry of ideas, and with her typically sparse and open-ended lines, Minnis approaches her subject from a dizzying array of angles: ironic, celebratory, mournful, panicked, and often funny.” —Publishers WeeklyChelsey Minnis’s new collection of poems follows the struggle of a flawed character in a cinematic world. Playing with old ideas of wealth and love from Holly wood’s golden era, these poems flirt with nostalgia without ever succumbing to it, casting a new light on the present through the fantasies of the past.What do you want with me? I’m just a dirty little shoplifter.I’m like a woman in a sequined gown in a dark cave. Can you tell me I’m worse than others?OK, yes, I’m worse than others, but can you say I’m the worst of all?Chelsey Minnis grew up in Denver. She attended the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She is the author of Poemland (Wave Books, 2009), Zirconia (Fence Books, 2001), Foxina (Seeing Eye Books, 2002) and Bad Bad (Fence Books, 2007). She lives in Boulder, Colorado. She also writes screenplays.

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"[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.

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"[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.

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Osman's writing reinvents poetry as an instrument for dissecting vision, language and power This extensive collection of poet Jena Osman’s acclaimed work spans more than 30 years, gathering poems from journals and books long out of print. Her poetry traces overlooked visual and linguistic incidents across centuries of American history, transforming "official" language—from Supreme Court opinions to the chatter of Predator drone pilots—into writing that is comic, chilling and relentlessly inventive. Jena Osman’s (born 1963) books include Motion Studies (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2019), Public Figures (Wesleyan University Press, 2012), The Network (Fence Books, 2010, selected for the National Poetry Series in 2009), An Essay in Asterisks (Roof Books, 2004) and The Character (Beacon Press, winner of the 1998 Barnard New Women Poets Prize). She lives in Philadelphia.

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