Unknowne Land - Softcover

Rivera, Elena

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932716539 ISBN 13: 9780932716538

Publisher: Kelsey Street Press, 2000

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Poetry. Lartino/Latina Studies. El‚na Rivera's UNKNOWNE LAND is a brilliant, mature, deeply engaging work, whose Question is constructed through its unfolding shape -- a developing exhalation of grief and wasted opportunity, both classical in its references and recasting of historic quest/myth, as well as expansively modern in its resistance to these known parameters. Rivera's writing is contemplative and thickly quiet, then bell-clear with linguistically researched tones of word on word, her ear perfectly pitched -- Kathleen Fraser. El‚na Rivera was awarded the Francis Jaffer Book Award for UNKNOWNE LAND. She is also the author of WALE: OR, THE CORSE, available from SPD.

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About the Author

Elena Rivera was born in Mexico City and spent her childhood in Paris, France. She is the author of two artists' books, Her Hand (1996) and a Botanist's Dream (1996). Elena won the first prize in the 1998 Stand Magazine (U.K.) International Poetry Competition and was poet-in-residence at the Djerassi Foundation in California in 1996. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

A new book prize from Kelsey St. press honors Francis Jaffer, the Bay Area poet, feminist and co-founder of innovative woman's writing magazine How(ever), who died last year. Rivera's debut makes a worthy first honoree, building on the work of poets like Susan Howe and Kathleen Fraser (who selected the book), and "[t]ravelling/ in a felucca through/ a shade called 'America.' " The four elementsAfire, earth, water, and airArespectively shape the book's first four sections, and the final section, the culmination of the narrator's poetic and personal journey through the book, is organized around "The Sphere." Each projects the traumas of a developing selfhood, marked by dislocation and gender oppression: "the child I had been eclipsed by ideas and beliefs/ so solid, so grounded that I became a somber shade / a weary, lusterless eye/ sojourning in a foreign land threshed with guts." The often archaic diction ("Who will lie with him to preserve the seed of the father?") and lush lists ("corundum, carnelian, granite") are familiar attempts at defamiliarization, and tone often remains too long in stylized drama. But the narrative's progression through the elemental sections is well-done, and the tension buildsA"I COULDN'T I ANYTHING I"Aas the poet seemingly heads toward self-exinction, "A fade out on the Scibe." Readers will await the well-earned return of a second book.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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