Revolver (Kuhl House Poets) - Softcover

Schiff, Robyn

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1587296950 ISBN 13: 9781587296956

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2008

Synopsis

As restless, reckless, and precise as the Colt revolver for which it is named, Robyn Schiff’s Revolver “repeats fire without reloading” as it reckons with the array of foreboding objects displayed at the Great Exhibition of 1851 and the traces of their ghosts one hundred years later.
      A dirge on the Singer Sewing Machine, an exuberant and unnerving rumination on multipurpose campaign furniture, and a breathless account of Ralph Lauren’s silver Porsche 550 Spyder are among the collection’s exhilarating corporate histories, urgent fantasias, and agonizing love poems. The long, lavish, and utterly unpredictable sentences that Schiff has assembled contort as much to discover what can’t be contained as what can.
     This is a book of extremes relentlessly contemporary in scope. And like the eighty-blade sportsman’s knife also described here, Revolver keeps opening and reopening to the daunting possibilities of transformation—“Splayed it is a bouquet of all the ways a point mutates.”

from “Silverware by J. A. Henckels”
Let me be
as streamlined as my knife when I say this.
As cold as my three-pronged fork that
cools the meat even as it steadies it.
A pettiness in me was honed
in this cutlers’ town, later bombed,
in which Adolf Eichmann, who was born there
alongside my wedding pattern, could hear
the constant sharpening of knives
like some children hear the corn in their hometowns
talking to them through the wind.
The horizon is just the score they breathe through
like a box of chickens
breathing through a slit.
 

About this title

About the Author

Robyn Schiff is the author of Worth (Iowa, 2002). She is an associate professor at the University of Iowa, where she is the director of the undergraduate creative writing program. She also coedits Canarium Books.

Reviews

Starred Review. Inspired by the variety of objects--such as the Singer sewing machine and an 80-blade sportsman's knife--presented at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (a kind of proto-world's fair), Schiff's astonishing second collection owes its title, and that of its whirlwind first poem, to another such object, the Colt rapid fire revolver. As in her debut, Worth, Schiff uses fashion houses and designers as delegates for the material world, effortlessly placing contemporary references beside mid-19th-century objects and ideas, encompassing all the history in between: "Might I, if there's one in stock, be sent the/ Ralph Lauren Winchester Tote/ shaped like the feedbags I've seen strapped on the/ fierce muzzles of the horses in pictures/ children are shown to depict/ for them how tasks, such as the/ feeding of horses, were accomplished in/ the Old West." The scope is dizzyingly wide, yet each shift in these poems feels necessary, and Schiff's long, beautiful sentences and relentless attention to language, history and the mystery of the human heart make these poems both thrillingly daunting and compulsively readable. This book springs from an imagination and vocabulary so surprising and intriguing that, in many poems, every line is a revelation. (Oct.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1587296950
• ISBN 13: 9781587296956
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 84