Ledger (Iowa Poetry Prize) - Softcover

Wheeler, Susan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877459274 ISBN 13: 9780877459279

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2005

Synopsis

An individual's crisis of spirituality and personal stewardship is placed against a backdrop of a culture that has misspent its own tangible and intangible resources, in an award-winning volume of poetry. 2004 Iowa Poetry Prize. Original.

About this title

About the Author

Susan Wheeler is the author of the poetry collections Bag 'o' Diamonds, which received the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America and was short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; Smokes, which won the Four Way Books Award in 1998; and Source Codes. A novel, Record Palace, will be published by Graywolf Press in May 2005. Her work has appeared in seven editions of the Scribner anthology Best American Poetry as well as in the Paris Review, London Review of Books, Verse, Talisman, the New Yorker, and many other journals. On the creative writing faculties at Princeton University and the New School's graduate program, she lives in Rocky Hill, New Jersey.

From Publishers Weekly

Combining pomo referential reach with spontaneity and non sequitur—"In any structure, you can obtain cable service"—Wheeler (Smokes) spans time and place to get at the multiple interconnections of economy and the consuming self in this fourth collection. Small-scale linguistic transactions trade bits of Chaucerian complaint ("Purse be full again, or else I must die") for current banality ("arc/ of trucks on the distant interstate, your what the fuck/ and then her call"). Amid competing stimuli, weighty and lovely lines do stand out, and the book resolves into its final section of six, "The Debtor in the Convex Mirror." Beginning with a description of the 1514 painting The Moneylender and His Wife, the poem moves in and out of scenes of Renaissance Antwerp (where the painting was done), contemporary Brooklyn, and a 1960s drugstore where teenage girls steal magazines. Similarities to John Ashbery's canonical, ekphrastic "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" are not accidental; though this poem does fall short of its great model, it does produce a unique, peculiar subjectivity that fugues around different kinds of debt—and guilt. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0877459274
• ISBN 13: 9780877459279
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 94