Synopses & Reviews
In this groundbreaking fourth collection comprised of exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers. The questions that have informed much of Kwasnys previous workhow does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?find a new urgency in
The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal. Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined itas resolution of the real and the dream,” Kwasny writes in the title poem. Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?
Review
Melissa Kwasnys work serves as a brilliant tonic, reminding us of the essential gravitas of poems of distinction. Hers present a richly textured surface and a deeply thought interior, and have a compass that deftly mingles the scholarly page with beauticians hopes and tobacco pouches; a naturalists tight focus with the wide gaze of a woman of the world; a lyricists gifts with a philosophers understandings. This is the real-deal stuff.”
Albert Goldbarth, author of
The Kitchen Sink, on
Reading Novalis in MontanaIn The Nine Senses, Melissa Kwasny follows the path of amor mundi beyond the senses five, never parting the real from the dreamt, the dead from the living, the lost from the loved, the solitary from the communal. In a book of prose poems, she makes her turns internally. As with my favorite words, rooms, faces, and flowers, I feel that light is sewn up into them. Between their lines moves an ethics of embodied becoming, like the tree, whole and shining, she gives us in the spaces of venetian blinds. The dawns are numbered, as I am, she writes. But in the joint counting houses of morphology and phenomenology, each hour could take a lifetime to know. Inside the devastation and the beauty, we sit with the question: will we seek salvation from the world, or a radicalized (re) attachment to it. Nay, too late for cost-counting says the hell-bound speaker in Christina Rossetti¹s Amor Mundi This downhill path is easy, but there¹s no turning back. Today more than ever we must ask ourselves which is the real hell: amor mundi or contemptus mundi. Turn away no more, says Blake. Kwasny has written us a book of charms, in the old sense. A book to bind us to the world, and to each other.”--Sarah Gridley
Synopsis
Drawing inspiration from the work of Rene Char, Melissa Kwasny in
The Nine Senses presents a new kind of prose poem. Casting aside the narrative-plus-moral formula of old, these experiments make each line equal to the next, challenging the way we read sequentially. Dylan Thomas, Roman water lines, Paul Celan, Shirin Neshat, anti-depressants, Buddhism, William Carlos Williams, Trakl, cancer, Beckett, Pound, Breton, the Iraq War, telekinesis, clairvoyance, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Yeats, among many others, appear side by side in these pages.
As if liberating the intellect, the prose poem form invites a wave of vivid, colliding images, and allows a comfortable wordiness and word play that is inherently poetic. Raising the ante even further than Reading Novalis in Montana, this book asks how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?
As bromides and aphorisms degrade in this new construct, we are left with the realization that we have been misled by culture and politics, which encourages prevarication. Obliquely touching on the cancer of a friend, her own troubled relationship with her father, and the break-up of a nearly thirty-year partnership, Kwasny also questions mortality, temporality, and eternity. Walking the knife-edge between safety and danger, and marveling over the quickness with which the familiar can end, Kwasny posits a new perception of time, in which the work lives on under new direction. Near the end of the book, Kwasnys signature abstraction melts away in some very direct poems about her own cancer and diagnosis.
With this manuscript, Kwasny achieves a new level of artistry. Although form is consistent throughout, the thematic cycle is rich and varied: abstract, elliptic, collaged, and ultimately evolving toward the end into powerful statements that are some of the most direct ever uttered by this author.
Synopsis
In these exquisitely crafted prose poems, Melissa Kwasny examines the world around her with the quiet and profound attention of a poet at the height of her powers.
The questions that have informed much of Kwasny's previous work--how does one have a relationship with the natural world in our time? What can we learn about being human from non-human forms of life?--find a new urgency in The Nine Senses, as image collides with image to produce a singular ecological and poetic vision, one that is often dire and surreal. "Perhaps the extra four senses contribute to the surreal in the sense that Breton defined it--as resolution of the real and the dream," Kwasny writes in the title poem.
Thematically rich and varied, touching on mortality, temporality, and eternity, this collection puts Kwasny on the forefront of American poetry, and asks the reader: how do we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are?