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* FINALIST FOR THE 2023 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR POETRY * In All Souls, Saskia Hamilton transforms compassion, fear, expectation, and memory into art of the highest order. Judgment is suspended as the poems and lyric fragments make an inventory of truths that carry us through night’s reckoning with mortal hope into daylight. But even daylight—with its escapements and unbreakable numbers, “restless, / irregular light and shadow, awakened”—can’t appease the crisis of survival at the heart of this collection. Marked with a new openness and freedom—a new way of saying that is itself a study of what can and can’t be said—the poems give way to Hamilton’s mind, and...
Poet Saskia Hamilton, author of As for Dream, explores "where the pull of reverie becomes palpable and eerily seductive" (Poetry). Only night First light I will not quite fit in this hole nor you with your long fingers —from "Divide These" These spare, evocative poems register things at the edge of our attention that confound our systems of belief. In Divide These, Saskia Hamilton brings delicate observation together with riveting assertion to make an original, unsettling music.
A series of brief, haunting lyrics and prose fragments, the poems in As for Dream hover in suspension between states of consciousness or being. Hamilton's verse both illustrates and investigates the human experience at many different intervals: as we wake from the dream world, as we meet the loss or disruption of our desires, as we tend to the ill, and as we die. Once we cross those boundaries, does the self remain intact? These poems record and question moments when we slip from the casing of the body and the social world and try to make our way back, or find we cannot.
"Hamilton is able to sustain a complex narrative through stripped-down poems . . . leavened by a wry humor." —The New York Times Book Review I wanted to read an essay in your wrist. The afternoon seemed endless. Out the window, a lane to the right was bending away, taking with it the figure moving down it. Alone for a quarter of an hour, looking in, plotting the argument, all the marks of lucidity and brevity in that attempt, that benefit of rhetoric: the true but unlikely moment. —from "Summered" Corridor, Saskia Hamilton's third collection, is a study of motion and time. Its glanced landscapes, its lives seen in passing, render the immeasurable in broken narratives. These poems are succinct in order to travel quickly—they have unexpected distances within their reach. They are dauntless and alert in their apprehension of the natural kingdom at the frontier of so many unnatural ones. And they inhabit the realm of contemplation which, for Hamilton, is charged with eros.
Whether Thersites in Homer’s Iliad, Wilfred Owen in “Dulce et Decorum Est,” or Allen Ginsberg in “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” poets have long given solitary voice against the brutality of war. The hasty cancellation of the 2003 White House symposium “Poetry and the American Voice” in the face of protests by Sam Hamill and other invited guests against the coming “shock and awe” campaign in Iraq reminded us that poetry and poets still have the power to challenge the powerful. Behind the Lines investigates American war resistance poetry from the Second World War through the Iraq wars. Rather than simply chronicling the genre, Philip Metres argues that this poetry gets to the heart ...
Exploration of our inner life—perception, thought, memory, feeling—once seemed a privileged domain of lyric poetry. Scientific discoveries, however, have recently supplied physiological explanations for what was once believed to be transcendental; the past sixty years have brought wide recognition that the euphoria of love is both a felt condition and a chemical phenomenon, that memories are both representations of lived experience and dynamic networks of activation in the brain. Caught between a powerful but reductive scientific view of the mind and traditional literary metaphors for consciousness that have come to seem ever more naive, American poets since the sixties have struggled to...
A vibrant history of the renowned and often controversial Iowa Writers’ Workshop and its celebrated alumni and faculty As the world’s preeminent creative writing program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has produced an astonishing number of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six U.S. poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This volume follows the program from its rise to prominence in the early 1940s under director Paul Engle, who promoted the “workshop” method of classroom peer criticism. Meant to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, cooperation and rivalry. Focusing on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program—such as Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson—David Dowling examines how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has shaped professional authorship, publishing industries, and the course of American literature.
Acclaimed poet and critic Maureen N. McLane offers an experimental work of criticism ranging across Romantic and contemporary poetry. In My Poetics, Maureen N. McLane writes as a poet, critic, theorist, and scholar—but above all as an impassioned reader. Written in an innovative, conversable style, McLane’s essays illuminate her own poetics and suggest more generally all that poetics can encompass. Ranging widely from romantic-era odes and hymns to anonymous ballads to haikus and haibuns to modernist and contemporary poetries in English, My Poetics explores poems as speculative instruments and as ways of registering our very sense of being alive. McLane pursues a number of open questions...
--Book Jacket.
This book considers the kinds of responsibility which modern lyric poetry takes on, or to which it makes itself subject - social, cultural, political, aesthetic and personal.