A Hot January: Poems 1996-1999 - Hardcover

Morgan, Robin; Morgan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0393048012 ISBN 13: 9780393048018

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1999

Synopsis

Presents a collection of poems that focus on the loss of love and its aftermath--feelings of isolation and betrayal

About this title

About the Author

Robin Morgan is the author of, most recently, Upstairs in the Garden. She lives in New York. Other books by Robin Morgan include The Anatomy of Freedom: Feminism in Four Dimensions, The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism, and The Word of a Woman: Feminist Dispatches.

From Publishers Weekly

"This is about what got left behind./ A family. A landscapeAblack sand, white water, green stone./ ....Then, more gradually, the loss of other things./ Pride. Sleep. Health. Weight. Hair. Bone. Time. Heart. Voice." Prolific poet and prose writer Morgan's sixth collection remains fixated on that knottiest of second-wave feminist conundrumsAhow one's personal tragedies and the much larger-scale conflicts of the world can share space in a single consciousness. That question produces some torturous shifts, as in the title poem: "How tedious this mourning over a lover is, how trite! Better/ to dwell on my country's shift to the Right, better to fight/ for houseless heads, better to heal the body, attempt full-peal/ to write." Elsewhere the poet reads from an encyclopedia, only to teases herself narcissistically with ideas of suicide. Again and again, a reader will look for some redeeming ironyAonly to find pathetic fallacy ("candytuft nodding in coy denial of problems you/ would not discuss") or jokes that don't quite come off: "Bucolic landscapes had all but put me six feet/ deep down under..." In poems very short and moderately long, couplets and sizable stanzas, lines end-rhymed and internally rhymed, one finds evidence of serious craft ("Glorious leader, bemedaled and embalmed,/ you lie at last a relic, marble-biered in state"), near obsessional soundplay and the attempt to fit empathic straight-talk into some pretty ornate structures. For some readers, dexterous discussion of oppression, illness, survival and heartbreak will be enough. But too often, Morgan's reflections cross the line from artifice and honesty to glibness and self-satisfaction. (Sept.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0393048012
• ISBN 13: 9780393048018
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 79