Worth
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
These strong, multilayered poems test the transformative powers of dressmakers, jewelers, actors, and Darwin’s darkest finches as they adapt to a changing world where the same train hurtles past them toward marketplace and death camp both. Throughout, many of the poems use inherited forms to tell their stories, but the inheritance here comes down damaged and threadbare—yet full of power.
In Worth Robyn Schiff inquires about making, buying, selling, and stealing in the material world, the natural landscape, and the human soul. Opening with the renowned couture house of Charles Frederick Worth, the father of high fashion— “The dress was so big, / one’s hand is useless to take glass from table; / the skirt approaches while the hand is yet distanced” —and ending with the House of De Beers and a diamond thief named Adam Worth— “You'll know me by my approach / I'm coming on foot with a diamond in my mouth” —Schiff moves from Cartier and Tiffany to the Shedd Aquarium, from Marie Antoinette to the Civil War, from Mary Pickford to Marilyn Monroe.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Out of Iowa come two ambitious first books that combine collage, Continental philosophy and disjunction with unusually strong commitments to particular subjects. Robyn Schiff's Worth spins hyperarticulate verbal patterns and tragic (or melodramatically hinted-at) plots around the arts of jewelry, parfumerie, and fashion design. Schiff (who holds an MFA from Iowa and a degree in medieval studies) gives her poems titles like "House of Dior," "House of De Beers," "Chanel no. 5" -except for seven poems named after finches. In long quotations and glimmering descriptive phrases reminiscent at times of Cole Swensen, at other times of Lucie Brock-Broido, Schiff creates with disturbing ease a high-stakes, often hyper-aestheticized world of royalty, glass cases, and tormented souls: "Dear Tapestry-Master,/ Where does the Devil Finch nest in your design?/ Dearly Appointed Chef,/ I am dissatisfied."
