The Portable Famine: Poems - Softcover

Arroyo, Rane

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1886157537 ISBN 13: 9781886157538

Verlag: BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, 2005

Inhaltsangabe

Poetry. Gay and Lesbian studies. "Erotic, irreverent, mournful, political, Arroyo's lyrics and narratives surprise, often by juxtaposing literary erudition and popular culture within the same stanza. The result is a hybrid poetics all his own. Read his arguments, direct addresses, dream poems, elegies, family narratives, and love poems to experience an incisive, original mind exploring `the square roots of restlessness.'"--Robin Becker.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rane Arroyo was born in Chicago and began his writing career as a performance artist. He is also a playwright and fiction writer. He received a Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. His awards include the Carl Sandbrug Poetry Prize, a Pushcart Prize, the Stonewall Books National Chapbook Prize, the Sonora Review Chapbook Award, the George Houston Bass Award for Drama, and the Hart Crane Memorial Award. He is professor of English at the University of Toledo, where he directs the creative writing program.

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When Rane Arroyo declares, “Even in imaginary America,/ America has to be imagined,” he signals the magical transports these poems enact. They bristle with geography—New York, San Juan, London, Provo, Reykjavík, Tijuana, Miami—and delight with innovation. His narrators, border-crossers in every sense, take up diaspora as a central theme: “Will any place actually be mine?” one asks. Lovers and family members and solitudes populate these pages, along with the beloved artists (Arenas, Blake, Neruda, O’Hara) who accompany the poet on his literal and metaphysical travels. “I’m the shore/of their shore leaves,” the speaker claims in “Saturday Night in San Juan with the Right Sailors,” illustrating his signature, linguistic playfulness. Erotic, irreverent, mournful, political, Arroyo’s lyrics and narratives surprise, often by juxtaposing literary erudition and popular culture within the same stanza. The result is a hybrid poetics all his own. Read his arguments, direct addresses, dream poems, elegies, family narratives, and love poems to experience an incisive, original mind exploring “the square roots of restlessness.” —Robin Becker, Judge, John Ciardi Prize for Poetry Rane Arroyo’s elegies and celebrations shine with details as revelations, the moments when “our bodies are the books / spilling alphabets without fear.” Encompassing high, low, and middle cultures and dictions, juxtaposing Jesus and JFK, Pittsburgh and Puerto Rico and Palm Springs, sex clubs and San Juan sailors and sanctity, Toledo and Texas, Enrique Iglesias and the war in Iraq, Arroyo’s poems explore our various Americas, imagined and otherwise, in language by turns playful and profound, and in images both surprising and apt. —Reginald Shepherd, Author of Otherhood & Editor of The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries Rane Arroyo’s The Portable Famine continues the circulating queer sailor-merman odyssey begun in his earlier works. This volume represents his most powerful articulation to date of that odyssey. This displaced Midwest-based poet of Puerto Rican heritage turns consciousness into a “glass skull” that reflects as “transparent shadows” the historic and contemporary marks of war and empire, colonialism, neocolonialism, exile, diaspora, and globalization. —María DeGuzmán, Author of Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire Rane Arroyo’s The Portable Famine hungers for home—in both the physical and imagined worlds: “ My body wants / to be someone else’s history.” A pledge of allegiance to Arenas, Neruda, Auden, Blake, Ritsos, Pasolini—to “ambassadors from a country / that doesn’t exist”—these poems re-envision the meaning of “port” for a sailor, draw a blueprint for a new Statue of Liberty: “I’m the shore / of their shore leaves.” —Angie Estes, Author of Chez Nous & Voice-Over FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly Proudly Puerto Rican and gay, well-traveled in the U.S. and Europe, and devoted to the modernist projects begun by Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane, Arroyo (Home Movies of Narcissus, etc.) makes all those identities and commitments evident in his compact, intelligent and sometimes sexy seventh book. Arroyo directs many poems here at artists and writers, among them Stevens; the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas (subject of the film Before Night Falls); and, in the opening lyric, "The Singer Enrique Iglesias as My Muse in These Troubled Times": in Iglesias's song, "Music yields to the yes underneath breath." Arroyo's well-controlled stanzas describe mourning, love and especially travel: New Orleans (before the hurricane); Chicago (where he grew up); Florence, Italy; London; Miami; Pittsburgh, Pa.; Provo, Utah; Palm Springs, Fla.; Reykjavik, Iceland; Ohio (where he teaches) and Puerto Rico offer subjects for solid poems. Arroyo's goals of modernist density and erotic immediacy sometimes get in each other's way. At his best, though, Arroyo (like Timothy Liu) can depict desire, frustration, a high culture heritage and an unwilling distance from that heritage, all in the same few lines: "My body," Arroyo writes, "wants/ to be someone else's history," even as he continues to show his readers his own. (Nov.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: BkMk Press of the University of Missouri-Kansas City
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2005
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1886157537
• ISBN 13: 9781886157538
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 63
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar