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Catherine Wagner's Miss America makes poetry of contemporary erudition and confession out of a new sort of baroque plain speech. Wagner's roving eye and ear take into consideration all the offerings of our world- magazines, breakfast, ghosts- and find brilliant encryptions of human physical reality in perfect words. Nothing is too far away or too close to warrant reaction: Good Housekeeping, Edmund Spenser, mayonnaise, boobs, death; all compose Wagner's vernacular of music and knowledge, a kind of thinking out loud that translates into a witty, vertiginous awareness.
This limited edition of 10 copies includes a signed archival pigment print of Columbus Penelope Delilah (2005), from the series Re-classifying History.
With Nervous Device, Catherine Wagner explores the boundary the poem marks between poet and audience on the map of desire.
Larry Sultan and Mike Mandel began working collaboratively together in 1973 while graduate students at the San Francisco Art Institute. They work together on occasional projects that include artists' books, exhibitions and public art.
Wagner's poems proclaim, among other things, a finitude--"I'm total I'm all I'm absorbed in this meatcake"--that is anything but final, that is instead embodied and generative. From the completion of the human body arise the actions of the human mind; it is these that Wagner charts, with affection, detachment, a measured embarrassment, and a calculated grossness, in defiance of all recommendation. That Wagner is in love with the world and its transactions--perception, superficial and otherwise; childbearing, painful and otherwise; domestic arrangement, satisfactory and otherwise; gains, financial and otherwise--allows for a poetry that is full of song yet brazenly topical: Its subjects range from the controlled experiment of selfhood to the blooming and pruning of personal dynamics on a road-trip to " . . . God and country / given up and given." In this, Catherine Wagner's second book, we spy a poet espousing, somewhat fearful of her mandate and putting that fear to good use in the service of real exchange.
Every year, millions of students pay enormous sums to pursue a college education. Most have no idea how easily a single false cheating accusation can derail their dreams. Shocked, shamed, and silenced, they watch their futures crumble in the university kangaroo courts of "academic integrity." Catherine Wagner was an enthusiastic, top-performing student when she unwittingly walked into a trap. She provided authorized aid to a classmate on one part of one homework question, as her professors specifically encouraged. A grader later flagged their answers as "similar," and both students were accused of cheating. Innocent, and certain that she would be exonerated, Catherine had no idea that one pr...
In this 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 he 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." In each of the four series that make up this book we find a female body watching itself and marking that watching with a severe wit, charmed visuals, and the analytic prowess of a born human.
Poetry and Work offers a timely and much-needed re-examination of the relationship between work and poetry. The volume questions how lines are drawn between work and non-work, how social, political, and technological upheavals transform the nature of work, how work appears or hides within poetry, and asks if poetry is work, or play, or something else completely. The book interrogates whether poetry and avant-garde and experimental writing can provide models for work that is less alienated and more free. In this major new collection, sixteen scholars and poets draw on a lively array of theory and philosophy, archival research, fresh readings, and personal reflection in order to consider work ...