Synopses & Reviews
In her second collection, Idra Novey steps in and out of jails, courthouses, and caves to explore what confinement means in the twenty-first century. From the beeping doors of a prison in New York to cellos playing in a former jail in Chile, she looks at prisons that have opened, closed, and transformed to examine how the stigma of incarceration has altered American families, including her own. Novey writes of the expanding prison complex that was once a field and imagines what’s next for the civilians who enter and exit it each day.
Review
"‘Enter an apple / And come out the teeth marks / In its yellowed core,’ writes Idra Novey. In this spare, remarkable collection, she harnesses and transforms prison experience into a visionary exploration where boundaries dissolve, and we find ourselves transformed."—Arthur Sze, author of The Ginkgo Light
Review
"In Exit, Civilian, Idra Novey takes Vasko Popa’s ‘little box’ and morphs it into a ‘little prison.’ The sweetness of the name ‘little prison’ draws us in, and Novey tracks her discomfort with the justice system with surprising and illuminating tenderness. Novey has taught for the Bard Prison Initiative—one poem zooms in on the poignant detail of the crumpling of a wedding dress as it moves into and out of the prison, another imagines a mother named ‘Trial’ giving birth to a child, ‘Verdict.’ I finished this book with these words still in my head: ‘Do you want to hear more / About the little prison / Have you noticed / It is everywhere.’ These poems truly change what and how we see."—Matthea Harvey, author of Modern Life
Review
"We only imagine ourselves free. Idra Novey's stark, inventive poems hurtle forth with brash lyricism, forcing us to reflect on our roles as captives, alternate swinging open and slamming shut the prison doors. There is no work like this, no tales so beautiful and hurtful, no stanzas that bite this hard and linger this long."—Patricia Smith, author of Blood Dazzler
Review
"[T]he book reveals superb acts of attention, by a writer whose reliable moral sense matches her first-rate ear."—Publishers Weekly
Review
"The prisons, courthouses, and hideaways featured in Novey's National Poetry Series winner are very real, but we don't encounter so much bars, barbs, and barbed wire as metaphysical shrinkage and change. . . . Startling."—Barbara Hoffert,
Library JournalReview
"A meditation on imprisonment, using surrealism as a tool to understanding the real; this is a smart and immaculately crafted book that deserves and rewards you."—Mathias Svalina, The Volta
Review
“Novey’s work has always had a subversive quality, exploring unsanctioned facets of identity, and her discoveries here are just as fresh as in her first collection, if more openly dangerous and political. . . . [Her] images and scenes are meticulously constructed, crystalline, inviting us into a parallel world that reflects back the darker parts of our own.”—Michael Simon, Denver Quarterly
Review
"[Novey's] modes vary from flashes of anecdote to surreal narrative, from prose to brief lyrics to long-lined poems. The effect is one of an extended reach toward concretions, routines and environments that won't yield to mere wishes to understand or change them. . . . In Exit, Civilian, the thing is the prison, intractably present—and freedom, more than simply a life outside a jail, comprises an infinite speculation on the meaning of itself. The tonal gives way to the atonal, the fuzzy." —Ron Slate, On the Seawall
About the Author
Idra Novey is the author of The Next Country and has received awards from the Poetry Society of America, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the PEN Translation Fund. Her translations include Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G.H., (New Directions, 2012). She has taught in the Bard College Prison Initiative and in Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
The Little Prison
Then, before understanding, my heart went
Civilian Exiting the Facilities
Riding By on a Sunday
Aspect
Overhead
Parole
The Little Prison Responds
All Ceremonies Start with Inspection
Meanwhile the Watermelon Seed
Titles in the City Library
white as hair whitens. Then, before understanding
Eighteen Hours of Daylight
As Charged
House Arrest
The County Courthouse in the Winter
The Itinerant
Grand Jury, the Sound of Leaves
Slide Show
Table for Six
Parole Hearing
Before They Came for Us
Hearsay
The Little Prison Responds to the City
Titles in the City Library
my heart went white as hair whitens
On Bafflement
The Etymological Beginning
Recent Findings
The Metaphysics of Furniture
The Lava Game
Instead of
The Little Prison Responds
If Vallejo Hadn't Died in Paris
Riot
Titles in the City Library
Then, before understanding, my heart went
O Caldeirão do Diabo
Memorias do Cárcere
Fist and After, El Cinzano
A Maça no Oscuro
The Guest
The Ex-Cárcel of Valparaíso
The Last Beep and Door
Notes