How to Build the Ghost in Your Attic - Softcover

Shippy, Peter Jay

Softcover

ISBN 10: 097898482X ISBN 13: 9780978984823

Publisher: Rose Metal Press, 2007

Synopsis

Poetry. A book-length narrative poem, or a novella-in-verse if you prefer, HOW TO BUILD THE GHOST IN YOUR ATTIC is a novel-poem with a literary sci-fi bent, a shadow-text to Oedipus written in a style that is up-to-the-minute. With wit, dynamism, and cutting senses of urgency and humor, Iowa Prize winner Peter Jay Shippy tells the tale of Isaac Makepeace Watt, a melancholy man living in a Thebes that is much like contemporary America. The House of Cadmus still rules (and will fall), but they only appear in the poem as media white noise. Isaac's concerns are personal, his father's illness and his own moral decrepitude. There are talking monkeys, plagues, oracles, and nano-robots-you know, the usual agoramania.

About this title

About the Author

Peter Jay Shippy is the author of A SPELL OF SONGS (Saturnalia Books, 2013), Thieves' Latin, winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize, Alphaville (BlazeVox, 2006), and HOW TO BUILD THE GHOST IN YOUR ATTIC (Rose Metal Press, 2007). He has been awarded writing fellowships from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2005 he received a Gertrude Stein Award for innovative poetry. He teaches writing at Emerson College.

Reviews

Iowa Prize winner (Thieves' Latin) Shippy's third collection is a novella-in-verse written in stepped tercets reminiscent of William Carlos Williams'. Told by a resident of a very modern-sounding Thebes, the poem presents itself as a Bizarro-world remake of the Oedipus cycle. Yazoo, a cow, crashes through the chatty speaker's ceiling, spurring him to pontificate about his media-obsessed life and personal struggle with a sick father. Dreamy, playful and at times campy, Shippy's poem interweaves the voices of talking monkeys, birdbots and a flirty Sphinx. The text bends and blends genre, myth and allegory, highlighted by the speaker's catchy patter: "After // her chutz- / pah / I can't manage to oompah // the money shot." This is ambitious work that manages to be frequently dynamic, describing a world much like our own: "These are dark days for our town. / A virulent stain of self-schaden- / freud- // e / is replicating / spreading the boos."
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Edition details

• Publisher: Rose Metal Press
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 097898482X
• ISBN 13: 9780978984823
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 88