Synopses & Reviews
Poetry. "In THE FATALIST Lyn Hejinian continues her distinctive charting of the connections between her life, her reading, and her thinking that was begun in MY LIFE and that fantastically metamorphosed into A BORDER COMEDY...[It] is one more wonderful explanation"--Juliana Spahr. "'That's what fate is: whatever's happened,' writes Lyn Hejinian at the end of her breathtaking long poem, THE FATALIST. In this sense we are all fatalists, since "whatever" has happened to us all, and we all recognize it when we see it. Yet it has seldom been more sumptuously tallied, tablulated and illuminated"--John Ashbery.
Synopsis
A book-length, syntactically surprising poem divided into many sections, it is interspersed with delightful descriptions of daily experience with references to illustrious writers and thinkers of the past and their systems of philosophical inquiry. It offers humorous reflection upon our species' endless attempts to transmit insight regarding our human condition.
About the Author
Lyn Hejinian is a poet, essayist, and translator. Her groundbreaking book of poetry, MY LIFE, published by Sun and Moon/Green Integer, has had five reprintings from 1980-2002. Her most recent books include A BORDER COMEDY (Granary Books, 2001), SLOWLY and THE BEGINNER (both published by Tuumba Press, 2002), and THE FATALIST (Omnidawn, 2003). The University of California Press published a collection of her essays entitled The Language of Inquiry in 2000. In the spring of 2007, she was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She teaches in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley.