Perfect Disappearance (New Issues Poetry & Prose) - Softcover

Rhodes, Martha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0932826997 ISBN 13: 9780932826992

Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose, 2000

Synopsis

In Perfect Disappearance, the much anticipated follow-up to Martha Rhodes’ startling first book, we shift gears: the damaged child/woman has grown into a full-fledged adult who continues to speak for this singular “unkillable” life. Rhodes now enters new realms of the darkly erotic conjoined with the liberated sensibility of a survivor. Cagey, evasive, subservient, unappeasable, Rhodes animates her speakers with a voice full of grit and urgency, and the results are electrifying.

About this title

About the Author

MARTHA RHODES is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books. She holds degrees from New School University (BA) and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (MFA). She is the author of four collections of poetry: The Beds (Autumn House, 2012), Mother Quiet (University of Nebraska Press / Zoo, 2004), Perfect Disappearance (2000 Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), and At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1995). She has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California, Irvine. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She also has taught at The Frost Place, Third Coast Writer’s Conference, Bucknell University’s June Seminar for Younger Writers, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a frequent panelist at universities and conferences around the country. She is the current director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. She lives in NYC.

From the Back Cover

Praise for At the Gate (Provincetown Arts Press, 1995)

"...These short poems, by turns savage, wry, mordantly witty, tender, stern, deluded, sane, read like a series of fragments, bits of mosaic; they duplicate on the page a sense of the past's being, piece by piece, recovered; they convey, devastatingly, the moment of a pattern's emerging; the little scenes and vignettes, the suspect tools of memory, cohere heart-stoppingly and absolutely into a narrative which fuses the damaged body to the divided heart..." (Louise Glück, from The Forbidden, Proofs and Theories; Essays on Poetry (Ecco Press)

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Husbands

Who are these men? They say I hired them, owe them wages. They know the delicate handling of trees: One describes himself and his friends At my snake-clogged well lowering buckets-- Inside this house, chocolate and winter stir. I refuse to remember family I had. Off to the village: medicines, Drinkable water, and the grocer Who sells such items proposes To cut my hair, repair my house. He knows just where the bedroom paper peels-- Three ragged violets at the southeast corner-- How often he must have slept there--but with whom? I've lived in that house alone, and always.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Issues Poetry and Prose
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0932826997
• ISBN 13: 9780932826992
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 51