Tokyo Butter: Poems - Hardcover

Moss, Thylias

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892553197 ISBN 13: 9780892553198

Publisher: Persea, 2006

Synopsis

From the acclaimed, award-winning poet, this new collection is a gripping search for life and truth.

From Thylias Moss, one of America's most innovative poets, comes Tokyo Butter, perhaps her most innovative book to date. Inventing new poetics as she goes, Moss applies her exhilarating capacity for language to a synthesis of the personal, the historical, and the cultural. She searches searches for vestiges of Deirdre, a beloved cousin who has left the living; for hints of Cindy Song, a college student missing since 2001; and for manifestations of her true self in the archaic wings of science.

Moss' imagination is, as always, ravenous, interrogativebut in Tokyo Butter there is an urgency amidst the jagged, beautiful verse that has become her trademark.

About this title

About the Author

Thylias Moss is a professor of poetics and creative writing at the University of Michigan.

From the Back Cover

All is not well with the world. Young girls are missing and never return, young men are wrongfully thrown in prison and lose whole decades of their lives, a Japanese dairy company sells tainted milk and falsifies expiration dates on seven-hundred-sixty tons of butter. The same exquisite cells that protect us from disease run amok and attack the myelin sheath.

Thylias Moss has never been a poet of easy comforts, and Tokyo Butter is Moss at her most distinctive. With fury and exhilarating velocity, she heads straight ito the maelstrom. She excoriates; she sings. From the lost traces of a childhood friend and the fated sorrows of Ulster myth, from absence itself, she wrings "a kind of witness and believer protection program." She is a priestess and debunker, skeptic and celebrant, in a single dazzling trajectory.

-- Linda Gregerson

From the Inside Flap

In "Tokyo Butter," Thylias Moss seeks to make sense of the jarring void that the death of Deirdre, her beloved cousin-friend, has created.

The result, however, is far from the solace and memorializing of elegies past. Tokyo Butter is a dazzling galaxy of connections in which Moss searches ravenously for remnants of Deirdre, unearthing clues in gruesome news stories and arcane wings of science, in balloon warfare and Internet search engines. She careens from one context to the next, integrating what she finds long the way into her reconstruction of the deceased, "no hour not devoted / to her absence that becomes, by the hour, / more and more a godlike absence."

Tokyo Butter represents the most innovative work to date by one of America's most innovative poets--a primal, enthralling search for life in death.

Reviews

This eighth outing from MacArthur "genius" grant winner Moss (Slave Moth, 2004) is her most ambitious. Loosely organized around the idea of missing persons—Moss's friend Deirdre, dead in Italy; an abducted child named Cindy Song—these extended, long-lined, energetically digressive poems yearn to connect everything to everything else: "any surface revealed by delving is the outside/ of something also a gate and trapdoor." Carnival games of whack-a-mole, older women's wombs, space stations, dinosaur excavations and bioluminescent cabbage come together on a single page. African-American experience provides just one strand of what Moss calls her Limited Fork Poetics, her way of including everything: modes of inquiry proper to geology, biology, geography, physiology, theology and blasphemy all get extended hearings. Her title stands for the slippery nourishment of figurative language itself: "Peanut butter is a tributary of the Butter Nile fanning out." The long central poem "Deirdre: A Search Engine" includes contrapuntal moments of flat grief, of welcome understatement: "we say she's up there, but we go to the cemetery"; "without her being there, nothing is the way she would have wanted it." This anchor piece gives heft and clarity to what might otherwise feel overwhelming, establishing Moss as a creator with an unmistakable mind. (Oct.)
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Moss is a highly original poet of amplitude and verve, her poems at once cerebral and sensual. Circling the mystery of absence in her newest brimming collection--the disappearance of a stranger named Cindy Song and the death of her beloved cousin, Deirdre--Moss juggles a set of metamorphosing motifs to create breathtaking, funny, and scathing riffs on natural processes and human practices. Snow, glass, eggs, accidents, decay, mutations, saving face, head scarves, funnel cake, chromosomes, fruits, and flowers all inspire kinetic collages, with butter serving as a strange and poignant unifying substance. It is in "DEIDRE: A SEARCH ENGINE" that Moss' modus operandi comes clear. She is emulating a "Google odyssey," rendering lyrical the odd juxtapositions and eureka moments of Internet searching. But so organically ordered and so complex and hybridized are the shape-shifting, morally ordered mindscapes Moss engineers that they possess not a techno aura but, rather, a Hieronymus Bosch-like surrealism. "To live is to embrace the danger of rapture," writes Moss, and the same can be said of reading this fascinating and demanding creation. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Persea
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892553197
• ISBN 13: 9780892553198
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 134