Meme (Kuhl House Poets) - Softcover

Wheeler, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1609381270 ISBN 13: 9781609381271

Verlag: University of Iowa Press, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Book by Wheeler Susan

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Críticas:

Praise for previous books: "As the years and books mount, Wheeler's verse feels increasingly grounded, without sacrificing rhetorical force."--Boston Review Praise for previous books: "Wheeler accomplishes something no one has done before, bringing all her interests and influences together to make poems that reflect an America no one else has seen . . . of how love in America might work: we never get enough, and . . . what we need is distraction, busywork, stuff to consume."--Craig Morgan Teicher, Yale Review "Meme is a haunted work. We are ushered in by the disembodied voice of a mother figure, scolding and teasing in the time-stamped slang of past decades. The anachronism is both funny and terribly sad. 'Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, ' the voice says. And it turns out that's fair warning. This cracked Virgil leads us into a consciously Dantean underworld ('Had you entered the thicket in darkness / . . . Had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis?'). Wheeler has created a total (and to me terrifying) linguistic environment in which hell is the introjected voices of other people, the hungry ghosts of our recent past."--Rae Armantrout, author, Money Shot "In Meme, the traditional elegy dissolves into excited bursts of imitated idiomatic speech interwoven with writing from a different register--the coolly removed, self-insightful lyric. That the elaborately constructed edifice that is personality can be reconstructed with such fascinating economy and delightful indirection is amazing. These poems are pure poetic genius."--Mary Jo Bang, author, The Bride of E

Reseña del editor:

Acclaimed poet Susan Wheeler, whose last individual collection predicted the spiritual losses of the economic collapse, turns her attention to the most intimate of subjects: the absence or loss of love. A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation; examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, "are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches." Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children? Wheeler reconstructs her mother's voice-down to its cynicism and its mid twentieth-century midwestern vernacular-in "The Maud Poems," a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in "The Devil-or -The Introjects." In the book's third long sequence, a generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission in "The Split." A set of variations on losses and break-ups-wildly, darkly funny throughout and, in places, devastatingly sad-"The Split" brings Wheeler's lauded inventiveness, wit, and insight to the profound loss of love. One read, and the meme "Should I stay or should I go?" will be altered in your head forever.

Über diese Auflage

• Verlag: University of Iowa Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1609381270
• ISBN 13: 9781609381271
• Einband: Tapa blanda
• Anzahl der Seiten: 96