Synopses & Reviews
Midsummer Cambridge, MA, 2008
and#160;
Midsummer. Finally, you are used to disappointment.
A baby touches phlox. Many failures, many botched attempts,
and#160;
A little success in unexpected forms. This is how the rest will go:
The gravel raked, bricks ashen, bees fattenedandndash;honey not for babes.
and#160;
All at once, a rustling, whole trees in shudder, clouds pulled
Westward. You are neither here nor there, neither right nor
and#160;
Wrong. The world is indifferent, tired of your insistence.
Garter snakes swallow frogs. The earthworms coil.
and#160;
On your fingers, the residue of red pistils. What have you made?
What have you kept alive? Green, a secret, occult,
and#160;
Grass veining the hands. Someoneandrsquo;s baby toddling.
And the phlox white. For now. Midsummer.
A remarkable first book, Disorder tells the story, by turns poignant and outrageous, of a familyandrsquo;s dislocation over four continents during the course of a hundred years. In short lyrics and longer narrative poems, Vanesha Pravin takes readers on a kaleidoscopic trek, from Bombay to Uganda, from England to Massachusetts and North Carolina, tracing the path of familial love, obsession, and the passage of time as filtered through the perceptions of family members and a host of supporting characters, including ubiquitous paparazzi, amorous vicars, and a dubious polygamist. We experience throughout a speaker forged by a deep awareness of intergenerational, multicontinental consciousness. At once global and personal, crossing ethnic, linguistic, and national boundaries in ways that few books of poetry do, Disorder bristles with quiet authority backed by a skeptical intelligence.
Review
“The narrator of Katie Peterson’s book
The Accounts has strayed into a myth in which no guiding figures remain, and with no way to prove or save herself. Who knew the complexity of grief could be drawn with such shocking simplicity and masterful depth?”
Review
“Katie Peterson’s impressive poems belong to the school of omission and inference. ‘I didn’t come here to make speeches,’ she says in her poem ‘Earth,’ yet the poems in The Accounts fill you with wonder at what is not being said so skillfully. ‘Pockets of silence,’ they are called, and they contain precise measurements of feeling and thought. In their quiet complexity, Peterson’s accounts involve and entrap the reader in serious conversation.”
Review
“As the title of this brilliant book suggests, Katie Peterson prizes the plural, the multiple, the still to be said. That earth has given her, as it has given each of us, one story, a story that ends, is the source not only of her outrage but also of her patience: sentences that enact the work of thinking and feeling as if never to end. At the center of this labyrinth, a mother’s death, a daughter’s grief. ‘Do not ask what has been lost,’ says Katie Peterson, ‘ask what changed.’ To read The Accounts is to be changed in turn, to require what the author of these hauntingly intelligent poems will say next.”
Review
“Stark, smart, funereal, terrifying at times. . . . Petersons is a careful, serious poetry, difficult in the way that real life is difficult, but clear and chilly as a long-held regret.”
Review
“In her third collection, Peterson confronts a mother’s death and earthly loss. With consistent measure and emotional depth, she creates a coherent world in miniature that mirrors the ever-shortening time frame of life. In one especially innovative sequence, alternating lines collapse into stanzas, recreating the finitude of mortality. Throughout the book, objects find fibrous, sinewy forms, things hewn and woven, lashed together like spirit to body. The speaker in ‘From the Nest’ watches a patient struggle to ‘turn the sounds / the sick mouth makes / into prayer.’ But also the shapes of new life rise—clawed feet, extra leaves, trellised limbs that terminate in the small hands of branches. Elsewhere, Peterson turns to the language of backyard gardening and tending nettles. Likewise, those familiar, refulgent faces, ‘the moon’s / deckle edge’ and the red sun, all ‘rust and blush and sunset, shining.’”
Review
“Peterson explores with tremendous lyric precision and emotional power not merely the heartbreak of personal tragedy but also the desire to make a beleaguered world new against the pressure of loss. Ovids spirit of metamorphosis haunts these poems and asks us to reconsider the redemptive power implicit in an account, how it is made, given, and made again.”
Review
“Recently, Ive been inspired by Katie Petersons collection of poems, The Accounts. Its a sober, psychologically delicate work. Peterson endows apparently commonplace observations with immense symbolic resonance and emotional power: its an art of strategic understatement.”
Review
"Peterson mindfully documents grief's intricacies from unexpected angles. . . . Peterson's music isn't easy; or rather, it isn't simple. It's rich, well-conceived, and reveals its maker as one of great integrity and intelligence."
Review
"I can't get Nate Klug's spare, clear poems out of my head, and thank God for that. I would say that he is at the beginning of a great career, but that sells this book short, which seems to me to already have elements of greatness. Anyone interested in poetry, regardless of camp or creed, is going to want to own this book."
Review
"One of the strongest books of elegy in the past decade"
Review
"Nate Klug's Anyone is a searching book. Its voice is quiet, vibrant, musical, and steadily, unusually, egoless. A hundred years from now someone—perhaps anyone—who wanted to know what it is like to perceive and feel, think and believe, in our times could find the answer in these poems, so touched by the past, so alert to the world in and around them. Like George Herbert's "virtue," they shine both in the day and in the night."
Review
"Klug's poems are like containers catching rain, ping by ping, they have perfect sound patterns made by the formation of a water they create themselves falling in. The Merton-Zukovsky epigraph at the start—‘In the whole that is unnecessary, every small thing becomes necessary’—perfectly captures the background for such finely tuned poems, as necessary as rain."
Review
andquot;Vanesha Pravinandrsquo;s Disorder is a dazzling debut. These elegant and spare reckonings with both personal and family history resonate with lyric urgency as they arise in the wake of Pravinandrsquo;s wistful--at times quietly sober--reflections. The narratives of Disorder overlap and tremble in their telling, just as the limbs of this family tree seem bent almost to the point of breaking, even as they reach for the future. This superb collection is a timely meditation on the vagaries and varietals of mixed cultures, and Vanesha Pravinandrsquo;s poetry is an ever-turning, kaleidoscopic lens.andquot;
Review
"Aristotle said that the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor, and to be one is to be a genius. Voisine is that great thing, and that genius. Nearly every line of every poem is its own poem. She has re-visioned our most looked-at things. She brings us new ways to see, and to be. To travel through the neighborhood of this collection is to be surprised at every corner turned, but to recognize it completely. There is no greater poetic gift, or thrill."
Review
andquot;A central challenge for American art has been the confluence of immigrant histories. Rising above conventional approaches to that material, urgent and severe, Vanesha Pravinandrsquo;s Disorder attains a global and historical perspective uniquely personal yet wide-ranging.andquot;
Review
"'The next poem I write will be better,' begins the final poem in Connie Voisine's wonderful Calle Florista. This strikes me as quite a hefty promise, since the poems in this volume are already so gratifying and surprising. They carve a marvelous spot for themselves at the crossroads of joy and regret, pathos and humor, faith and doubt, elegance and quirkiness, making the very most, not only of 'the flimsy scraps that more genuinely / compose the day' but also of the very largest concerns: 'Maybe the soul isn’t a fussy eater-- / still, it is ravenous / and expensive.'"
Review
"In her haunting new collection Calle Florista, Voisine dances at the edge of nihilism, an imaginative and moral strategy borrowed from George Herbert, whose style of doubt and recovery she celebrates throughout the book. Her poems flirt with ugliness and with nothingness, negating the body, the street, the desert flowers, the natural world itself. Yet an astonishing, powerful affirmative lyric drive wells up: ‘the way a wren /of a word then another gives itself to a sentence.’ These remarkable poems operate like everyday miracles, driving the reader from despair to belief, word by word—into the perfect radiance of profound poetic revelation."
Review
andquot;Disorder roots itself in the idea of uprootedness. The poemsandrsquo; many subtitled names and dates point to the rearrangement or disorder of interwoven chronologies: the poetand#39;s storyandmdash;her childhood and itinerate adulthoodandmdash;and her familyand#39;s meandering and troubled past. If and#39;survival depends on stories,and#39; the indelible characters Pravin recreates are, all of them, alive. Pravinand#39;s masterful sense of distance and quiet intensity create a sense of suspension, so that the emotions of even the most intimate lyrics brim just beneath the lines. The poems are remarkable in their capacity to be at once intricate and spare. The bookand#39;s adrift, often solitary, central speaker ponders her seemingly inherited displacement, and the book is rich with other bequests: in different poems, that speaker and her great-grandmother are and#39;resignedand#39; and and#39;inured,and#39; respectively, and#39;to the unexpected.and#39; Culminating in the forceful and unforgettable penultimate poem, and#39;Belief Revision,and#39; Disorder is an astonishing debut, unexpected in its maturity, understatement and resonance.andquot;
Synopsis
The death of a mother alters forever a family’s story of itself. Indeed, it taxes the ability of a family to tell that story at all.
The Accounts narrates the struggle to speak with any clear understanding in the wake of that loss. The title poem attempts three explanations of the departure of a life from the earth—a physical account, a psychological account, and a spiritual account. It is embedded in a long narrative sequence that tries to state plainly the facts of the last days of the mother’s life, in a room that formerly housed a television, next to a California backyard. The visual focus of that sequence, a robin’s nest, poised above the family home, sings in a kind of lament, giving its own version of ways we can see the transformation of the dying into the dead. In other poems, called “Arguments,” two voices exchange uncertain truths about subjects as high as heaven and as low as crime. Grief is a problem that cannot be solved by thinking, but that doesn’t stop the mind, which relentlessly carries on, trying in vain to settle its accounts. The death of a well-loved person creates a debt that can never be repaid. It reminds the living of our own psychological debts to each other, and to the dead. In this sense, the death of this particular mother and the transformation of this particular family are evocative of a greater struggle against
any changing reality, and the loss of all beautiful and passing forms of order.
Synopsis
Miltons God Where I-95 meets The Pike,
a ponderous thunderhead flowered
stewed a minute, then flipped
like a flash card, tattered
edges crinkling in, linings so dark
with excessive bright
that, standing, waiting, at the overpass edge,
the onlooker couldnt decide
until the end, or even then,
what was revealed and what had been hidden.
Using a variety of forms and achieving a range of musical effects, Nate Klugs Anyone traces the unraveling of astonishment upon small scenesnatural and domestic, political and religiousacross Americas East and Midwest. The books title foregrounds the anonymity it seeks through several means: first, through close observation (a concrete saw, a goshawk, a bicyclist); and, second, via translation (satires from Horace and Catullus, and excerpts from Virgils Aeneid). Uniquely among contemporary poetry volumes, Anyone demonstrates fluency in the paradoxes of a religious existence: To stand sometime / outside my faith . . . or keep waiting / to be claimed in it.” Engaged with theology and the classics but never abstruse, all the while the poems remain grounded in the phenomenal, physical world of what it is to feel: / moods, half moods, / swarming, then darting loose.”
Synopsis
Connie Voisines third book of poems, Calle Florista, centers on the border between the US and Mexico and celebrates the stunning, if severe, desert landscape. Southern New Mexicos proximity to Mexico (indeed, it was still a part of Mexico until 167 years ago) is also an occasion for Voisine to explore themes of splitting and friction in both human and political contexts. Through a combination of directness and excision, the poems in this book oscillate between describing complex, private sensibilities, on the one hand, and, on the other, cracking the private self open (and vulnerable) to the wider world. The focus on the Mexico-US border is also a way for Voisine to experiment with the speaking voice in the poems: whose space is this border, she asks, and what voice can properly tell the story of this place?
Synopsis
This remarkable first book of poems tells the story, at turns poignant and outrageous, of a familyandrsquo;s dislocation over four continents during the course of a hundred years. In short lyrics and longer narrative poems, Vanesha Pravin takes the reader on a kaleidoscopic trek, from Bombay to Idi Aminandrsquo;s Uganda, from Birmingham, UK, to Birmingham, Alabama, and traces the path of familial love, of obsession, and the passage of time and death through the perceptions of various family members and a host of supporting characters, including ubiquitous paparazzi, mysterious hermaphrodites, and a dubious polygamist. At once global and personal, crossing ethnic, language, and national boundaries in ways few books of poems do, the speaker in the poems bristles with a kind of quiet authority backed by a skeptical intelligence. This is a powerful and unusual addition to Phoenix Poets.
Synopsis
This World and That One Sometimes you defy it,
I am not that, watching a stranger
cry like a dog when she thinks she’s alone
at the kitchen window, hands forgotten
under the running tap.
The curtains blow out, flap the other side of the sill.
In you one hole fills another,
stacked like cups.
You remember your hands.
Connie Voisine’s third book of poems centers on the border between the United States and Mexico, celebrating the stunning, severe desert landscape found there. This setting marks the occasion as well for Voisine to explore themes of splitting and friction in both human and political contexts. Whose space is this border, she asks, and what voice can possibly tell the story of this place?
In a wry, elegiac mode, the poems of Calle Florista take us both to the edge of our country and the edge of our faith in art and the world. This is mature work, offering us poems that oscillate between the articulation of complex, private sensibilities and the directness of a poet cracking the private self open—and making it vulnerable to the wider world.
Synopsis
Happiness,” Jonathan Swift wrote, is the quality of being well-deceived.” In this long-awaited second collection, Maggie Dietz investigates our sometimes near-sighted notions of happiness, interweaving loss and motherhood, the death of a parent, and the persistence of hope, in poems that are characteristically sharp-eyed, varied, and evocative. Her first book published in the series did unusually well, with positive reviews in prominent publications. In this new collection, Dietz does what Phoenix Poets poets do best: write beautiful poems on difficult subjects, looking head-on at problems and situations that a clever turn in a poetic line wont necessarily solve. The book is, in the words of one of our readers, a bracing, various pleasure to read.”
About the Author
Connie Voisine is associate professor of English at New Mexico State University. She is the author of two previous books of poems: Rare High Meadow of Which I Might Dream, also published by the University of Chicago Press; and Cathedral of the North. She lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
I
The Pharmacistand#8217;s House
First Wife
Midsummer
Second Wife
Agapanthus Is The Word
The Arrangement
The Ninth Floor
Morgendand#228;mmerung
Innocence
Mystery
Courtship, 1944
The Conquest of Happiness
Green
The Third Gender
Sweet Milk
Sleep, Wake, Sleep
Buffalo Milk
Late Afternoon
Hemma Remembers Two Cities
Hemma Remembers Disorder
Hemma Remembers Sickness
Bootcamp Vipassana
The End of Summer
II
Rivers
Birmingham, UK 1969
Night with the Vicar
Courtship, 1971
The Ninth Month
In the Garden
Sunday
Funeral
The Polygamistand#8217;s Buttons
Hoo
Dictionary
The Library Sale
Cambra
Marriage
Sleeping in the Walmart Lot, 1996
Pomegranate
Rain
CVS Pharmacy
Time
and#8217;79 BMW Stalls Again
City Aubade
III
Boll Weevil and the Make or Break
Belief Revision
Night
Appendix: Family Tree