Voice-Over - Softcover

Equi, Elaine

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566890780 ISBN 13: 9781566890786

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 1998

Synopsis

Synthesizing twenty years of influences, Equi constructs a collage of voices—undoubtedly American, exquisitely her own.

“Nothing needs us

but we need

a lot of reassurance

before we can reassure

those things we thought

we needed that they exist too.”

About this title

About the Author

Elaine Equi, author of Click and Clone (Coffee House Press, 2011), was born in Oak Park, Illinois, and raised in Chicago and its outlying suburbs. In 1988, she moved to New York City with her husband poet Jerome Sala. Over the years, her witty, aphoristic, and innovative work has become nationally and internationally known. Her last book, Ripple Effect: New & Selected Poems, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and on the short list for Canada’s prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize.

Among her other titles are Surface Tension, Decoy, Voice-Over, which won the San Francisco State University Poetry Center Award, and The Cloud of Knowable Things. Widely published and anthologized, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, the American Poetry Review, the Nation, and numerous volumes of The Best American Poetry. She teaches at New York University, and in the MFA Programs at the New School and the City College of New York.

Reviews

Like the New York School poets, Equi finds her art within the contradictions and chance encounters of urban life: "He was made/ to do nothing/ but lean against/ tall buildings./ A somber/ exclamation point,/ eating an apple?/ turning it slowly/ into ballet," she writes in "Armani Weather." Elsewhere, Equi can be found enthusing about anything from fennel to a fedora, seemingly aiming for the frisson of low-high cultural collision: "Shocking Pink! Pagan Pink!/ Milk of Magnesia and Panther Pink." But unlike New York Schoolers Joe Brainard and Frank O'Hara, Equi is writing in an era that entirely sanctions such poetic effusions. Still, despite a bit too much kitsch, Voice-Over retains the generous, sometimes sophisticated humor that pervaded the poetry of her idols, adapting their unabashed sentimentality ("Doesn't it seem wonderfully optimistic when someone you hardly know signs a note 'Love'?") and even channelling her master's voice in "Monologue: Frank O'Hara." Perhaps the most noticable change from earlier books like Surface Tension is a growing preoccupation with growing older (in the voice of Lorine Niedecker: "Hair almost all gray now?// Eyebrows are the last/ to show age and the eyes never") and with a pervasive numbness where "the world is diluted." If such sentiments sometimes make for less than satisfying reading, they also show the poet struggling with "this sense of eternity/ however brief?."
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Manhattanbased poet (Decoy, 1994, etc.) reflects the New York School sensibility at its most playful in this ninth volume, full of philosophic nuggets, jokey wordplay, and tinysometimes one-wordlines. An urban chatterer like OHara, a minimalist like Williams, Equi likens her poems to Joseph Cornells dreamy box collagescollections of disparate objects and images that, in her case at least, seldom leave much of an afterglow. Cutesy to a fault, her more gnomic verse disguises a basic sentimentality (e.g., Starting to Rain or Night School). One-idea poems include many that simply demonstrate their titles: Table of Contents for an Imaginary Book; Karoake Poem; or Little Landscape. Poems meant to mock advertising seem more often a symptom of it: Armani Weather, for one, could be a description of a fashion photo shoot. Two poems pay homage to the transparent verse of promo icon Lorine Niedecker: Almost Transparent and the collage of lines from her letters, From Lorine. Equi aspires to deep thinking, mixing high and low cultural ideas: Self Portrait as You imagines a multiple self and dreams of Heideggers words/in Marilyn Monroes mouth. But most of the time Equis abstractions are fortune-cookie heavy (Sexual fantasies are more than just mood music) and her imagery banal (Edward Hoppers figures lean/like plants/toward light). Despite her linguistic pretensions, and her Asiatic posturings, Equis poems are just small in every way. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

New York poet Equi delights us with another volume of good-humored poems, written in her vivacious style. Equi's is a strongly contemporary voice, steeped in the sounds and spirit of her times, her fingers soundly on the pulse of her generation. Yet her poetry shows few hints of despair or alienation; she challenges and surprises with her spritely use of language. In the freshly, fiercely feminine poem "Beauty Secret" she writes, "It must be/ like losing your/ fear of death/ to just stop/ worrying about/ what you look like?" and "From my mother/ I learned to fear beauty/ the lack of it/ and from my father/ to distrust it." Equi writes crisply, with short (sometimes one-word) lines that accentuate the forcefulness and sureness of these poems. She is not one to mince words, for, as she says, "In poems we shine,/ and though we say them with conviction,/ the words are never really ours for keeps." Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.?Judy Clarence, California State Univ. Lib., Hayward
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566890780
• ISBN 13: 9781566890786
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 96