Because the Brain Can Be Talked Into Anything: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) - Hardcover

Richman, Jan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807119938 ISBN 13: 9780807119938

Publisher: Louisiana State University Press, 1995

Synopsis

Winner of the 1994 Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets. Robert Pinsky was the judge of the 1994 competition. Paper edition (unseen), $8.95. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

About this title

About the Author

Jan Richman 's poems have appeared in The Nation, Ploughshares, the Bloomsbury Review, and many other journals. She has received the Felix Pollack Poetry Prize, a Discovery/The Nation Award, and the Celia B. Wagner Award. She lives in San Francisco.

From the Back Cover

In selecting this dazzling first collection of poems as winner of the 1994 Walt Whitman Award, Robert Pinsky praised Jan Richman for the "rowdy, restless intelligence" of her work. Indeed, all of the poems in Because the Brain Can Be Talked Into Anything are the result of a compulsive, unflinching inquisitiveness - a desire to make some sense of modern life by scrutinizing the paradoxes and contradictions inherent in our world. Ultimately, among the surprising turns of language, the hard edges and twisted aphorisms of an outspoken narrator, the sense of personal history re-emerges as haunting and essential. The book offers no formula for self-knowledge; it winnows and rummages and, finally, finds truth in irony. This satiric/sincere dualism comes brilliantly through in "Why I'm the Boss". As in all Richman's poems, the wise-cracking, urban-hip tone gives way to an extremely personal world view, and the raw emotional underpinnings are finally revealed. These poems announce a fresh and powerful new voice.

Reviews

Winner of the 1994 Walt Whitman Award, Richman's collection is a bomb bursting upon contemporary poetry, dazzling us from the first lines and never letting up. By turns rowdy, contemplative, sexual, and flamboyant, Richman's work displays love of mischief as well as intelligence. The first poem, "Hells," begins, "Everyone has gone through hell, that's / what I love about the world." Although she begins with that audacity, she increasingly softens her rhetoric, moving from glibness to gentleness. Her topics range from Barbie dolls, dogs, and devil's advocates to passion, memory, and shame. No matter what she discusses, she retains a note of skepticism, as if whatever is built could be toppled at any moment, perhaps even by her own hand. She is poised, in every piece, to question everything and discard all conventions--an attitude reflected by the titles of the book's two sections, "Reasons" and "Excuses." Richman is definitely a poet to watch. Elizabeth Gunderson

Winner of the 1994 Walt Whitman Award (selected by Robert Pinsky), Richman's work explodes with electricity that is like a Fourth of July celebration, not of liberty but of a lively mind transforming disappointment into ingenious (and sometimes goofy) metaphor: "My laugh is like a beefsteak, my/temperature is zero. On the gills/of my dodge the inscription reads fast/and easy like an espionage thriller." Meaning in a "culture in a dark age" resides not in the circumstances of one's isolation but in how they are articulated. Richman conceives of inaccessibility as a pilgrimage to selfhood, a "survival in the wilderness." "Why I'm the Boss" is the title of a poem detailing everything false in modern society. Since we've "gone through hell," she adopts an ironical grin at fairy tales, "forgeries," and pieties, and nothing remains worth the effort of affirmation or love. ("History is memory, and it is gone.") Richman's tough and spirited poetic-constructs challenge readers on their own to fashion truth by which to live.
Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Louisiana State University Press
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807119938
• ISBN 13: 9780807119938
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 48