Revenants - Softcover

Nowak, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1566891078 ISBN 13: 9781566891073

Publisher: Coffee House Press, 2000

Synopsis

Mark Nowak encounters the whispers of creation and cultural remembrance in his eminent, visionary poetry. Revenants is an original return to a splendid ethos of ancestral word patterns, and the images bear the solemn pleasures of time, place, and singular landscapes.—Gerald Vizenor

This first book length collection of poetry by the editor of the journal XCP: Cross-Cultural Poetics explores the Polish American neighborhoods in and around Buffalo, New York, finding collective truths in the particularity of a unique culture.

Mark Nowak is the editor of Theodore Enslin’s selected poems, Then, and Now, and an associate professor at the College of St. Catherine in Minneapolis, Minnesota. His poems have been anthologized in An Anthology of New (American) Poets and Children of the Cold War: A Scrapbook.

About this title

About the Author:

A poet and labor activist heralded by Adrienne Rich for "regenerating the rich tradition of working-class literature," Mark Nowak regularly leads transnational poetry workshops between American and international trade unions. The author of Revenants and Shut Up Shut Down, he has also been a contributor to the Poetry Foundation's Harriet blog.

From Publishers Weekly:

A striking example of investigative poetics, this first collection uses ethnographic techniques to research the customs, history and stories of the poet's Polish ancestry. The poems are filled with domestic details: recipes, descriptions of clothing, food sold at markets, descriptions of rooms. From these private and local situations, the poems move from the particular to the universal, reaching across oceans and time to access larger human stories: "We speak/ of the mountains there, a spine that connects/ her house and mine./ I think about/ St. Casmir feeding birds. I think/ about the Infant of Prague." In the final section, "Back Me Up," Nowak collages together quotes from an ethnographer's field notebooks, scholarly essays, and interviews conducted in western New York with the members of his local Polish community. These assembled fragments simultaneously question and affirm the poet-ethnographer's attempt to find his own identity within his rich cultural heritage. Many of the poems lack C.S. Giscombe's austere punch or Susan Howe's missionary zeal, to name two poets working in similar modes, but Nowak's quiet investigations should find an audience with anyone interested in Polish-American identity or in poetry's potential for projecting the self into the self-descriptions of others. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication date: 2000
• ISBN 10: 1566891078
• ISBN 13: 9781566891073
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160