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With their extravagant musicality, Triplett’s poems explore the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled “supply chain” that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world. Equal parts celebration and lament for the mechanisms we shape and are shaped by, these poetic acts reveal the poet as an entangled mediator among registers of public and private, intimate and historical, voicings. Here we traffic in the blessings and burdens of the human will to shape a world. What’s more, as we follow these linked enchainings of the deeply en-worlded citizen, we reawaken to the central paradox of our time, the need to refuse easy answers, to stay open, trilling, between these necessary notes of critique and of compassion.
In Rumor, her third collection of poems, Pimone Triplett summons diverse Eastern and Western influences to reckon the public and private costs of the overwhelming glut of "intelligence," or information, that we face in contemporary life. Triplett relays the voices, both personal and distant, that too often are only partially heard. The most difficult realities of family life are chronicled in "Family Spirits, with Voice of One Child Miscarried," in which Triplett uses free verse that incorporates the traditional Thai verse form of khap yanii. Over the course of the book, she explores how a child grows from a hint, a rumor, to a full force of intelligence and knowing. "Motherland" and "Last Wave" amplify voices, respectively, of exploited children in the brutal Thai sex trade and the victims in the aftermath of the 2004 tsunami in the Indian Ocean. The fragmentary nature of rumor, whether in the form of tabloid gossip or in the spread of partial knowledge, has consequence on a personal and even a world historical scale in Triplett's powerful poems.
As restless, reckless, and precise as the Colt revolver for which it is named, Robyn Schiff’s Revolver “repeats fire without reloading” as it reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later. A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren’s silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection’s exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’...
In their unique blend of linguistic energy and stunning emotional conviction, Pimone Triplett's poems richly weave the strands of myth, culture, and history into a personal landscape of the imagination. Hers is a startling new voice in American poetry-surefooted on the page, with a dazzling richness of texture throughout. "Pimone Triplett has a large discursive intelligenge, a keen lyric sensibility, a strong feeling for drama. . . . What an abiding pleasure to encounter a first book of such maturity." --Edward Hirsch
An indispensable resource for anyone interested in the art and craft of contemporary poetry
Of Pimone Triplett's The Price of Light, David St. John, judge for the Levis Poetry Prize, writes " this is] a collection of astonishing scope and power. Her poems are linguistically electric and each of her delicate meditations reflects an enviable intellectual ease. This is a volume of poetry that can travel from Beato Angelico to Robert Schumann with passion and vision, from Bangkok to rural America with a truly natural eloquence. Lyrically elegant and constantly inventive, Double Life is an amazing blend of the traditional and the radical in present day American poetry. Deeply intimate and yet historically informed, these poems weave a complicated multicultural tapestry that speaks not only for this poet, but for all of us."
Anthem Speed affirms Christopher Bolin’s emergence as a singular stylist in twenty-first century American poetry. By turns austere, gritty, futuristic, and visionary, Bolin’s poems trace the romance between beauty and destruction like vapor trails, seeming to emerge from nowhere and yielding a lucid, unearthly glow, an evocation of absent presences and scattered signs: “among / the disinformation of the distress feeds,” Bolin writes, “a pilot hears his coordinates / being called by other planes.” This collection evokes the vividly mysterious remnants of a lost civilization. Its preoccupations are unnervingly familiar: war, injustice, brutalization of land, air, water, and species, technologies of terror and dehumanization. Simultaneously antique and space-age, inhabiting a world of elemental rites and of artificial imaginations, Bolin tests the acoustics of operating rooms, battlefields, courtrooms, and mountainsides, and envisions—with animal acuity—a world imperiled and empowered by its leaders and myths.
Edited this year by acclaimed poet and writer Doty, the foremost annual anthology of contemporary American poetry returns. It is an essential guide to contemporary American verse and the poets who define it.
Hajar Hussaini's poems in Disbound scrutinize the social, political, and historical traces inherited from one's language. The poems seek beauty and understanding in sadness and confusion, and find the chance for love in displacement, even as the space for reconciliation in politics and thought seems to get narrower.
Finalist: 2013 Miller Williams Poetry Prize