Late Empire
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- 13,99 €
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- 13,99 €
Description de l’éditeur
“Olstein places the mystical next to the mundane. . . . She explodes theories of cause and effect and expands our notions of logic, symbolism, and the territory between dreams and waking experience.” —The Growler Poetry Review
In her fourth book—a gorgeous call-to-arms in the face of our current social and political conditions—Lisa Olstein employs her signature wit, wordplay, candor, and absurdity in poems that are her most personal—and political—to date. Like a brilliant dinner conversation that ranges from animated discussions of politics, philosophy, and religion to intimate considerations of motherhood, friendship, and eros, Olstein’s voice is immediately approachable yet uncomfortably at home in the American empire.
From “Essay Means to Try”:
Already during these two weeks of crying
I’ve purchased seven books each of which
felt important to own and taken one hundred
and forty vitamins and filled three prescriptions,
none to help with the crying. I’ve waited
patiently or impatiently in countless lines,
Whistle, sometimes crying . . .
Crying is how we enter the world, Whistle.
We all come by sea, we all come
by storm, we all tear apart and are torn.
Lisa Olstein is the author of four books of poetry and earned an MFA at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She teaches at the Michener Center at the University of Texas and lives in Austin, Texas.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This timely yet elemental collection from Olstein (Little Stranger) unfolds where the exigencies and distractions of daily life brush up against the political, the ethical, and the existential. The whistle, an ambivalent sound, repeatedly intercedes as a refrain in the prose poems of the collection's core, where such phenomena as school concerts, global warming, conversations among friends, animals in captivity, kidnappings, car radios, Kurt Cobain, and Godzilla make their presence known. "This world, Whistle, there's nothing for it, what can we possibly say?" The whistle, fills the space where language is unable to reconcile the individual and the daily with the grand, historic, and often catastrophic ways in which "we all tear apart and are torn." The extended prose blocks constitute just one of several modes, each of which occupies a distinct section in the book. The single-stanza meditations that open and close the collection mix humor, exposition, and lyrical beauty; relatively traditional sonnets offer wordplay and imagination; a numbered sequence of poems in tercets take Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space as source text and offer an apt ars poetica: "By clear-eyed words can one/ hear oneself close? The rote/ of the sea, the roar of, the glint." Olstein's profound and attentive poems reveal her formal dexterity and knack for spotting modernity's absurdities: "Some days even business as usual seems rare."
