Plot
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- USD 17.99
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- USD 17.99
Publisher Description
This poetry collection by the acclaimed author of Citizen presents an "inexhaustibly complex, varied, and . . . grimly inventive" meditation on maternity (Verse).
In Claudia Rankine's Plot, an expectant mother, Liv, and her husband, Erland, find themselves propelled into one of our most basic plots: boy loves girl, girl gets pregnant. Liv's respect for life, however, makes her reluctant to bring a new life into the world.
The couple's electrifying journey is charted through dreams, conversations, and reflections. A text like no other, it crosses genres, existing at times in poetry, at times in dialogue and prose, in order to arrive at new life and baby Ersatz. This stunning, avant-garde performance enacts what it means to be human, and to invest in humanity.
"Plot moves as in a picaresque novel, in which the body schemes and frightens, accompanied by Claudia Rankine's instinct for poetic surprise." —Barbara Guest, poet and author of Herself Defined
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spiraling around the story of "Liv" and "Erland" and their future child, "Ersatz," this book-length poem embeds its loose "plot" in the sensations and anxieties of birth and child-rearing: "Liv, answer me this: Is the female anatomically in need of a child as a life preserver, a hand, a hand up? And now, pap smeared, do you want harder the family you fear in fear of all those answers?" One of the more striking moments is when the three main figures conjoin to render the self-other situation clear: "That same night Erland pressed his ear to Liv's belly./ What do you hear? Liv asked./ Not you, Erland answered. Not you." Unfortunately, unlike Rankine's tersely investigative The End of the Alphabet, Plot is particularly prone to run-on, obfuscated formulations and grammatical constructions: "the damaged image absorbed to appear, the exemplar seen and felt as one, having grown thick in the interior, opens on to surface and is the surface reflecting its source." (Such passages may actually be purposefully "embryonic.") A dialogical "Interlude" and a series of odd, graphically charted pages chart further separations, but don't feel completely motivated. This book seems consciously aimed at the nexus of several different feminist avant-garde projects, from the nouveau roman of Monique Wittig to Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's Dictee. If it doesn't quite hit the mark this time, it promises further inquiry.
