Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies - Softcover

Koestenbaum, Phyllis

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0964434849 ISBN 13: 9780964434844

Publisher: LA Questa Pr, 2001

Synopsis

Doris Day and Kitschy Melodies is a book of prose poems that captures the reader as a novel would. The book is full of the quirky details of life and memory. The book covers the author's life from World War II until the 1990's.

About this title

About the Author

Koestenbaum, a native of Brooklyn, is the author of seven poetry books and chapbooks. Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arts Council of Santa Clara County among others. Koestenbaum is a senior scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, Stanford University, California.

Reviews

The details of a richly recalled life mingle with more abstract speculation about memory, gender and reading in these pleasantly associative, and occasionally striking, prose poems. Though they range in subjects from Hitler to the '50s icon of the title, from nail salons and optometrists to California, Judaism, opera, Gide and the nature of consciousness, Koestenbaum's one- and two-page works share a mode of construction: flat sentences about people, places and events mingle sometimes charmingly, sometimes at random with lyrical or lightly ironic abstractions. The poems seek a tone, and a cultural space, somewhere between Grace Paley's prose and Lyn Hejinian's influential My Life, though they do not always equal those models. Koestenbaum (Criminal Sonnets) can sound unduly startled by her memories: "Patti LuPone played Maria Callas on Broadway: from nowhere comes Patti LuPone." Elsewhere she simply unrolls bits of autobiography: youthful fears of Hitler, grown-up meals in Cambridge, Mass., a cancer scare, grown sons and "the suburban neighborhood where I was a conventional mother and wife" all remain of interest in themselves, but are rarely transformed by style. (One of her sons is the poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum.) At her best, as in "Rembrandt" or "Cassandra and Irene" (from which the collection takes its title), Koestenbaum's understated prose blocks explore neat hypotheses about life stories (her own and others'): "painters on townhouses... paint and pain and talk and talk. When they've moved on to their next job, what will distract me, what outside interference that becomes as much the main narrative as the main narrative." Main or not, these narratives will find their fans.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: LA Questa Pr
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0964434849
• ISBN 13: 9780964434844
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 82