Search results for ""author sarah dowling""

How can we carve private spaces from discarded publics? DOWN takes junk language -- with cameos by Frank O'Hara, Frank Ocean, Aaliyah and the Temptations -- and distresses it, building sonically dense poems that are caught between the poignancy and flatness of their source texts. Disorientation and defamiliarization yank fresh feeling from banal sentiments in this playful collection. 'I've believed in Dowling's poems for a long time with you. Or maybe you're just now catching up to how the genius is working her machine on our minds? Gravity of letter in the word measured and dispensed with inimitable grace. The words are familiar, yes, but we get them again from this magnificent poet who is not going to let us just trample the smallest of them. I have tremendous respect for any poet who strives to be even half as great as Sarah Dowling.' -- CAConrad 'After all of the previous avant-garde's perpetual rediscoveries of Gertrude Stein's formal innovations, Dowling reminds us that her best poetry was, above all, sexy. Where Dowling surpasses is in her recognition of the phatic, the emphatic, the obsessive understanding of the cultural syntax of infatuation. Everything in DOWN is palpably cloudy in its thick description: I am starstruck.' -- Craig Dworkin Sarah Dowling is the author of Security Posture and Birds & Bees. Sarah's poetry was included in the anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. She teaches at the University of Washington Bothell and is international editor at Jacket2.

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An abandoned town named for the classical lesbian leads to questions about history and settlement. Driving along the Pacific Coast Highway, you come to a road sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement—about why we’re here in front of this sign? Mixing historical documents, oral histories, and experimental translations of the original lesbian poet’s works, this book combines documentary and speculation, surveying a century in reverse. This town is one of many with a classical name. Take it as a symbol: perhaps in a place that no longer exists, another kind of future might be possible.

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