Synopses & Reviews
A much anticipated third collection with poems mourning a mother figure, as well as recently deceased cultural icons.
Praise for Kathleen Ossip:
Ossip conjures delightful and unexpected muses
shrewd and ambitious.”
New York Times Book Review
"The Do-Over, Ossips third collection, is a lyrical, open-ended, meta-leaning meditation on the subject of death
.[A]n exquisite cocktail of displacement, minutiae, and metapoetic introspection."
Boston Review
The biggest surprise in poetry for 2011 is this second book by Kathleen Ossip. Its got everything one could wish for in a new collection of poems. . . . Its just beautiful. And terrifying.”
Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2011
The poet has an uncanny ability to convey what it actually feels like to be alive today
Ossip is one of our foremost ethnographers of contemporary unreality.”
The Believer
How do you stay in heaven?” Ossip asks, Is it a kind of sophisticated rewind?” Her third collection of poems is haunted by the idea of rewind, and especially by the teasing possibility that we, toolike the moon, like a plantmay be granted cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The book's overarching narrative is the death of the poets stepmother-in-law, a cherished, loving, eccentric woman who returns to its pages again and again. But in spite of its focused grief and ontological urgency, The Do-Over is a varied collectionshort acrostics mourn recently dead cultural icons (Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Donna Summer); there's an ode to an anonymous Chinese factory worker, three true stories” that read like anecdotes told over drinks, and more. The Do-Over is an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure, a fragmented portrait of its difficult, much loved subject. It's also a snapshot of our death-obsessed, death-denying cultural moment, which in Ossip's gifted hands turns out to be tremulous, skeptical, unsure of ultimate values and, increasingly, driven to find them. I am still studying, arent you?” she begins. Readers will eagerly embrace the surprise, humor, and seriousness of her quest.
Review
"It may be the case that Ossip understands the elasticity and capaciousness of contemporary poetry better than anybody. . . . This is our book."
NPR
Unassuming and masterfully crafted, Ossips poetry is sneaky, very often disguising itself as easy and surprising you the moment you let your guard down. . . . The Do-Over is a kind of elegy to contemporary culture: it critiques modern life while basking in its ever-younger, glitzier rabble."
The Paris Review
Review
"Working in acrostics, chain verse, prose, couplets, quatrains, Ossip's a magpie who pilfers from magpies....[S]he has an eye for 'the light of the culture: gold and misleading' and an ear that saves her wisdom moments from bluntness: 'I see the forest, I see the trees. / What I can't see is the / dappled clearing I'm standing on.' And then she devastates you by removing a single letter from a common poetic word: 'In the clearing, the now is falling.'"
The Chicago Tribune
"It may be the case that Ossip understands the elasticity and capaciousness of contemporary poetry better than anybody. . . . This is our book."
NPR
"In as much as it makes sense to talk about writing as perfect, The Do-Over is not, nor does it mean to be. But it is remarkable: unusually alive, intelligent and alert; unusually imaginative in its ways of letting the now fall into poems that find more invitations in impermanence than any others Ive read recently."
Slate
Unassuming and masterfully crafted, Ossips poetry is sneaky, very often disguising itself as easy and surprising you the moment you let your guard down. . . . The Do-Over is a kind of elegy to contemporary culture: it critiques modern life while basking in its ever-younger, glitzier rabble."
The Paris Review
"Each of Ossips acrostics shows her to be a master of compression, whereas the longer, serial prose-verse poems demonstrate her ability to build longer structures without sacrificing density of language.”
The Brooklyn Rail
Synopsis
Kathleen Ossips much-anticipated third collection of poems presents an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure and recently deceased cultural icons.
Synopsis
A much anticipated third collection with poems mourning a mother figure, as well as recently deceased cultural icons.
Praise for Kathleen Ossip
-Ossip conjures delightful and unexpected muses...shrewd and ambitious.-
--New York Times Book Review
-The Do-Over, Ossip's third collection, is a lyrical, open-ended, meta-leaning meditation on the subject of death.... A]n exquisite cocktail of displacement, minutiae, and metapoetic introspection.-
--Boston Review
-The biggest surprise in poetry for 2011 is this second book by Kathleen Ossip. It's got everything one could wish for in a new collection of poems. . . . It's just beautiful. And terrifying.-
--Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2011
-The poet has an uncanny ability to convey what it actually feels like to be alive today...Ossip is one of our foremost ethnographers of contemporary unreality.-
--The Believer
-How do you stay in heaven?- Ossip asks, -Is it a kind of sophisticated rewind?- Her third collection of poems is haunted by the idea of 'rewind, ' and especially by the teasing possibility that we, too-like the moon, like a plant-may be granted cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The book's overarching narrative is the death of the poet's stepmother-in-law, a cherished, loving, eccentric woman who returns to its pages again and again. But in spite of its focused grief and ontological urgency, The Do-Over is a varied collection-short acrostics mourn recently dead cultural icons (Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Donna Summer); there's an ode to an anonymous Chinese factory worker, three -true stories- that read like anecdotes told over drinks, and more. The Do-Over is an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure, a fragmented portrait of its difficult, much loved subject. It's also a snapshot of our death-obsessed, death-denying cultural moment, which in Ossip's gifted hands turns out to be tremulous, skeptical, unsure of ultimate values and, increasingly, driven to find them. -I am still studying, aren't you?- she begins. Readers will eagerly embrace the surprise, humor, and seriousness of her quest.
Synopsis
"Ossip is about to take the poetry world off guard with what is surely among the most various, powerful, and representative (of post-terror America) poetry collections of the past few years."Publishers Weekly, starred boxed review
A much-anticipated third collection of poems mourning a mother figure, as well as recently dead cultural icons (Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Donna Summer).
I'm afraid of death,
the magician who
makes vanish and who
makes odd things appear
in odd placesyour
name engraves itself
on a stranger's chest
in letters of char.
About the Author
Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Cold War (one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2011), The Search Engine (selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize), and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Washington Post, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School in New York and online for The Poetry School of London. She was a founding editor of LIT and is the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.