Fair Copy (Journal CBWheeler Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Hazelton, Rebecca

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0814251854 ISBN 13: 9780814251850

Publisher: Ohio State University Press, 2012

Synopsis

Fair Copy, byRebecca Hazelton, is a meditation on the difficulties of distinguishing the real from the false, the copy from the original. It is in part an exploration of the disparity between our conception of love as either true or false and the messy reality that it can sometimes be both. If “true” love is not to be found, is an approximation a “fair” substitute? These poems repeatedly question the veracity of memory—sometimes toying with the seductiveness of nostalgia while at other times pleading for the real story. Here, the fairy tale and the everyday nervously coexist, the bride is an uneasy molecule, and happiness comes in the form of a pill. Composed of acrostics from lines by Emily Dickinson, the collection retains a direct and recurrent tie to Dickinson’s work, even while Hazelton deftly branches off into new sonic, rhythmic, and conceptual territories.

About this title

About the Author:

Rebecca Hazelton is visiting assistant professor at Beloit College, Beloit, Wisconsin.

Review:

“On her twenty-ninth birthday, Rebecca Hazelton decided to take the first line of every twenty-ninth poem of Emily Dickenson and use it as an acrostic to write her own poems.  Fair Copy, the edgy and compelling result of that inspired decision, is an implicit conversation across time as well as a contemporary woman’s search for meaning: ‘So this is the happy I’ve heard so much about.’ The journey to that moment of skeptical and nuanced amazement is a scintillating investigation of remembrance and regret conducted in dazzling poetry that dips into fairy tale, fable, and song:  “In the morning’s noise, I spin/out a song I’m forgetting,/no, that you have, what/shouldn’t be missed, but is, but was.” —Andrew Hudgins 

“This astonishing debut comes with its own set of poetics, one that’ll have present-day readers slapping their foreheads and saying ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ and future readers devising poetics of their own. Good luck to them! It’s hard to imagine anyone else evoking the warmth, the appeal, and the nervous intensity of Dickinson’s poetry the way Rebecca Hazelton does with these poems that pay tribute to yet transcend their roots in the fertile soil of Amherst.” —David Kirby

About this edition

• Publisher: Ohio State University Press
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0814251854
• ISBN 13: 9780814251850
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 80