Floating City: Poems (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) - Softcover

Wiese, Anne Pierson

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807132357 ISBN 13: 9780807132357

Publisher: LSU Press, 2007

Synopsis

Anne Pierson Wiese's first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life's routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place. Many are set in New York City, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate. When one dismisses from one's mind the idea that going to the park, doing the laundry, buying a sandwich, and riding the subway are familiar experiences, one makes room for the actual to ally with the hypothetical by means of the emotions. The result, Wiese eloquently shows, is a form of truth that is silently generated whenever human beings earnestly endeavor to absorb the world.

About this title

About the Author

Anne Pierson Wiese was born in Minneapolis and raised in Brooklyn. She was the recipient of the 2004 "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Prize and a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Raritan, Carolina Quarterly, and others. She currently resides with her husband in New York City.

Reviews

This is a majestic, magisterial book. Beginning with the most ordinary urban moments, Wiese's poems lead us into a jungle of mystery. In "The Taking," she heads for the subway, passing garbage bags torn apart by ragpickers, then discarded "for reasons known only to those who disappear." In "Death Has No Place," she considers the anonymity of graveyards in a city where "death has no place, / like drifting smoke it's exiled to the air," and she recognizes that "since death appears and leaves us no trace, / I'm afraid to go without knowing where." With gentle rhymes and stately meters, Wiese offers a classically influenced poetry that seems almost pastoral despite its urban setting. In Wiese's city, the untamed and untamable lurk everywhere, from a century plant bursting with bloom in a botanic garden to maples breaking rock that engineers could not to the desperate bird stuck in a laundromat. Weise leaps across conventional divides and shows us urban life's complexity. Patricia Monaghan
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Edition details

• Publisher: LSU Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0807132357
• ISBN 13: 9780807132357
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 72