Point and Line - Softcover

Field, Thalia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811214427 ISBN 13: 9780811214421

Publisher: New Directions, 2000

Synopsis

The new book spanning the genres of poetry, fiction, and theater, by the highly-acclaimed Thalia Field. The wonderful writings in Thalia Field's long-awaited new book Point and Line deny categorization, they are "nicheless." Perhaps describable as "epic poetries," these riveting pieces represent a confluence of genres in which Thalia Field has been involved over the course of her career: fiction, theater, and poetry. Written from a constructivist, post-genre sensibility, they elude classification, and present the author's concern with clarity in a world that resists it. For instance, in "Hours" and "Setting, the Table," Field uses indeterminate performance techniques to emphasize the categorical/conceptual nature of thought. Other pieces use generative schemes, portraits of mental shapes, which create meaning out of noise. Visually, each chapter is captivating, showing the author's need for shapes and colors in her work, her fascination with the contours of speech.

About this title

About the Author

Thalia Field is Adele Kellenberg Seaver Professor of Creative Writing at Brown University. Her most recent novel is Experimental Animals (A Reality Fiction) from Solid Objects Press. Her three New Directions books are Point and Line (2000), Incarnate: Story Material (2004), and Bird Lovers, Backyard (2010).

Reviews

Mike teases Sal about her hair and her shadowy shoulders./ He calls her his 'dirty little iceball' and she smiles that he loves her enough to name her." Debts to previous genre-busting metafiction and metapoetry, and a persistent interest in the physical properties of a book, are pulled through a winningly feminist sensibility in this remarkable debut. A set of nine discrete poetic essays, post-modern myths, apparently-unactable theatre-pieces, versified diaries, extended jokes and fictional experiments (along the tonal lines of Gillian McCain and others) add up to, as the Kandinsky epigraph describes it, "a new, independent life in accordance with its own laws." "Seven Veils," from which the opening quote is taken, uses long lines to tell the semi- or pseudo-story of a teenager who happens to be a comet as she careens brilliantly through "dummies," "governments," "households," animals and rites of passage. Heavily indebted to Wittgenstein, "A\1" interweaves the thoughts of an analysand with ideas about other situations, among them that of a cat in a famous philosophical quandary. "The Compass Room" experiments with perspectivism, multiple narrators and vague settings, in a way readers of John Barth will recognize: "Each book has a title and all chapters have numbers," it opens. "Walking" tries to recreate the moment-by-moment perceptual experience of a walker in a city, scattering phrases, lists, associations and sentences all over its 23 pages, in an ambitious update of late-model New York School verse. "Hours" is a postmodern parody of a play-script, with impossible stage directions for "Microbes" and "Whales." While the methods of proceeding are familiar, the characters and results are not, making this wonderfully varied first book a real pleasure. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811214427
• ISBN 13: 9780811214421
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144