Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems - Softcover

Jenkins, Louis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0930100611 ISBN 13: 9780930100612

Publisher: Holy Cow! Press, 1996

Synopsis

Winner of the Minnesota Book Award for Poetry, 1995

"To imagine what it means to be another human being is an act of love. These are poems written by a great lover of the world. Everything in it that stands alone, unobserved, and luminous. Solitary people with their solitary destinies...If there's a native, archetypical American solitude, Louis Jenkins has given us its flavor."--Charles Simic, The Boston Review

About this title

About the Author

Louis Jenkins lives in Duluth, Minnesota. His poems have been published in numerous literary magazines and anthologies. Among his books of poetry are An Anlmost Human Gesture, All Tangled Up With the Living, Nice Fish: New and Selected Prose Poems (winner of the Minnesota Book Award) and Just Above Water. He has read his poems on A Prairie Home Companion and was featured poet at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival in 1996. Two of his prose poems were published in The Best American Poetry 1999.

Reviews

Previously available only in limited-circulation books, Jenkins's work fills a great need in modern American prose poems, striking a balance between surrealism and precision thus far found mainly in translations. Many pieces are portraits and run the risk of becoming stories; instead they involve readers momentarily in a character's life, then turn an invisible corner, breaking the story line while holding the attention. Time vanishes; a history unfolds in the space of a paragraph. Crucial events are merely hinted at. A poem on aging, for example, ends with a moment "blinding as the flash when someone snaps a picture of you blowing out the candles." We begin in middle-age and end in middle age; we've gotten nowhere; it's all extremely well-crafted verbiage. We sit back and enjoy. An added bonus: Jenkins's brief introduction is one of the most lucid descriptions of the prose poem available.?Rochelle Ratner, formerly Poetry Editor, "Soho Weekly News," New York
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Introducing these prose poems, Jenkins writes that readers should "think of [them] as a door, another useful rectangle." Indeed, his tightly written paragraphs seem to be entryways, although occasionally they resemble selections from the openings of novels more than completed poetic pieces and leave us yearning for the rest of the story. The characters in them are immensely likable and realistic, from the "fat teaching assistant" who caught a student cheating on an exam and now spins her story into grand exaggeration to a night-shift waitress quietly filling a water glass and looking out a window to Lake Superior. Jenkins captures small scenes and solitary people, making the typical become fascinating. Many of the poems seem almost like small flowers ready to bloom just as the action ends. Elizabeth Gunderson

Edition details

• Publisher: Holy Cow! Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0930100611
• ISBN 13: 9780930100612
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 70