Search results for ""Author Elise Paschen""

“Somewhere in the family romance lies, each of us suspects, the secret or mystery of erotic power, the source of sexual energy to which, with slight but significant variations, we again and again return. Within the givens of familial, racial, gender, and class history lie the materials out of which we must make ourselves. Elise Paschen’s Infidelities explores these themes in powerful, striking ways. Paschen is as haunted as everyone else; out of this she has made a haunting book.” —Frank Bidart

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In Elise Paschen’s prize-winning poetry collection, Infidelities, Richard Wilbur wrote that the poems “. . . draw upon a dream life which can deeply tincture the waking world.” In her third poetry book, The Nightlife, Paschen once again taps into dream states, creating a narrative which balances between the lived and the imagined life. Probing the tension between “The Elevated” and the “Falls,” she explores troubled love and relationships, the danger of accident and emotional volatility. At the heart of the book is a dream triptych which retells the same encounter from different perspectives, the drama between the narrative described and the sexual tension created there. The Nightlife demonstrates Paschen’s versatility and formal mastery as she experiments with forms such as the pantoum, the villanelle and the tritina, as well as concrete poems and poems in free verse. Throughout this poetry collection, she interweaves lyric and narrative threads, creating a contrapuntal story-line. The book begins with a dive into deep water and ends with an opening into sky.

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