Climbing Back (National Poetry Series Books (Paperback)) - Softcover

Martinez, Dionisio D.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0393322629 ISBN 13: 9780393322620

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001

Synopsis

"[O]ne of the most important new works of poetry this year."―Kirkus Reviews

"Heartbreaking, overstuffed, seeping with history, lonelier than imaginable and truly in-the-face of American culture, Climbing Back's debris-field of prose poems tries with all its heart to outrun cultural paradigms and ends up refining our spiritual ignorance till it's our most gorgeous attribute."―from Jorie Graham's citation for the National Poetry Series. "Dionisio D. Martínez's Climbing Back is an epic-poetic-cinematic response to culture, a one-book shorthand to the 20th century and beyond, a series of responses to the world that are imaginative rather than reductive."―Susan Hussey, Organica

About this title

About the Author:

Dionisio D. Martínez is the author of Bad Alchemy and a recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in Tampa, Florida.

From Publishers Weekly:

With a cast that includes the likes of Hendrix, Garbo, Monet, the Elephant Man, JFK, Warhol, John Lennon and, repeatedly, a contemporary Prodigal Son, Martinez's fourth collection reads less like the Bible and more like a millennial spread in Vanity Fair. Selected by the biblically preoccupied Jorie Graham (viz. this year's Swarm) for the National Poetry Series, these prose poems document a tired collision of high and low culture, drawing on Miles Davis, for example, to inform us that an artist "learning to scat is not unlike a fire learning to burn." Poem after poem piles up people and images, "a wealth of possibilities on the cutting room floorAbuildings to be demolished, voices to obstruct, faces to rearrange in a crowd, faces to pull out of a crowd, fields to be filled with faces, faces to fill with bewilderment," here with a nod to Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro." The short titles in the third section (i.e. "Credo," "Fate," Faith") come as a relief after the incessant anaphora used in the rest of the book's 50-odd titles which, though individually playful, collectively flatten: "The Prodigal Son envisions nothing," "The Prodigal Son succumbs to secular miracles," "The Prodigal Son investigates the Hemmingway suicides," etc. (Resemblances to Marvin Bell's "Dead Man" may be purely coincidental.) While the combination of vernacular culture and spiritual searching will appeal to some readers, the message borne by this Son isn't quite up to its precedent. (Nov.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date: 2001
• ISBN 10: 0393322629
• ISBN 13: 9780393322620
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120