A Point Is That Which Has No Part (Iowa Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Waldner, Liz

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877457026 ISBN 13: 9780877457022

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2000

Synopsis

This collection of poems explores various kinds of longing and loss - sex, death, exile, story, love, and time. These poems draw from culture, both high and low - Eno and Aquinas, Lassie and Donne, Silicon Valley and Walden Pond.

About this title

About the Author

Liz Waldner's first book of poems was Homing Devices.

Reviews

From brief sarcastic couplets to dense, lush blocks of prose, Waldner's debut mixes sassiness, smarts and lyricism, intellectual querulousness with personal bitterness, vigor and exasperation. The prose poems here take up about half the volume, and demand to be read slowly; nearly every sentence pivots on some pun, accidental resemblance or double entendre. Brand names, "credit cards," WordPerfect error boxes ("Insufficient File Handles") collide with piles of quotes from canonical writers: Aquinas, Aeneas, Wallace Stevens, "that unearthly Aqua Velva color," As the World Turns. Sometimes the prose poems degenerate into echolalia: "The river Lysander. Today's a meander. Terrible weather for the day-after: dank, grey, danker, fear you'll go away." But elsewhere they are genuinely alert to common falsehoods and hidden truths: "it's true I am in love with your friend and not you? He got his body in first./ Some juice (I quote what I wrote at 16) is glue." Most of Waldner's lineated poems come out far sparer, suggesting the learned confidence of Heather McHugh. Each of the book's six parts comes with a title ("Point," "Circle") and epigraph from geometry and natural philosophy. But Waldner's metalinguistic obsessions, tics and jazzy contemporaneity do not prevent her from seeing a real world with people in it, making this debut worth seeking out. (Apr.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877457026
• ISBN 13: 9780877457022
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88