Whirlwind
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Whirlwind is one woman’s frank, witty, mordant, sexy look at the breakup of a marriage and its emotional aftermath. With her characteristic linguistic play and mixture of poetic registers and styles, Sharon Dolin takes her readers on an off-the-tracks emotional ride through the whirlwind that goes by the name of divorce. Hang on tight. Here poems are never merely confessional, but use formal aplomb to ride the white-heat rage, hurt, denial, reflection, regret, wistfulness, desire, and sexual passion as they go hurtling through the many stages of grief after the death of a relationship and the rebirth of a more vital self. Dolin tackles difficult subjects unflinchingly in her poems: such as betrayal and the shame of the one being betrayed, being a parent within a volatile breakup, as well as some startling poems on the reawakening of sexuality and an attention to the natural world and politics. In her poem that won a Pushcart Prize, she dons the mask of the Furies to confront her ex-husband and his lover. A journalist of her own heart, Sharon Dolin has written a brazen collection that seethes with the pressure of a story to tell: cathartic and thrilling in equal measure.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The latest from Dolin (Burn and Dodge) departs from her previous work in its forceful sadness, and in the unity of its themes: everything in it examines Dolin's divorce, the end of her marriage, her husband's affair, her anger and self-isolation, or, in the closing sheaf of poems, her new lover and their erotic rebirth. Consistent venom, recurrent bleak humor, and an overt awareness of precedent inspire Dolin's variety of forms: a litany, a ghazal, Dantesque unrhymed narrative tercets ("To the Furies Who Visited Me in the Basement of Duane Reade"), syllabics in homage to Marianne Moore, step-down lines like William Carlos Williams's, and a volume-ending tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca ("Blue how you'll ride me blue"). One of the best pieces builds up a lattice of puns: "When I lacked/ desire my love unlatched// his key from me and soon/ I lacked a lackey. Deserted,/ unstirred, to no sir inured." Despite all these stratagems, though, the collection can feel more like a prose memoir than poetry: "Why is it I feel shame for his having left?" one page begins. Some readers may be disappointed by Dolin's directness; others may see themselves in her travails, and find both delight and relief.
