Spinoza in Her Youth - Softcover

Cole, Norma

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890650099 ISBN 13: 9781890650094

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2002

Synopsis

These rich and rigorous poems delight in and disrupt the framing structures of language, memory, and history, so as to inhabit new fluencies of possibility. Encompassing a wide range of subject matter, while addressing concerns that emphasize the emotional, the political, and the philosophic, these poems all demonstrate a lyric integrity that is as responsive to the gravity of experience as it is to the pleasure one can find through the means of representing it.

About this title

About the Author

Norma Cole has published poetry, text/image works, essays, and translations. Cole is a recipient of the Wallace Alexander Gerbode Foundation Award and Gertrude Stein Awards, as well as awards from The Fund for Poetry. Her George Oppen Memorial Lecture, "Poetics of Vertigo," won the Robert D. Richardson Non-Fiction Award. Cole and Boston photographer Ben E. Watkins won the Purchase Award for their photo/text collaboration, "They Flatter Almost Recognize." Residencies include the Center for Poetry and Translation at Djerassi, Intersection for the Arts SF, the Fondation Royaumont, Bureau sur l’Atlantique, Louisiana State University, Kootenay School of Writing, Naropa University, and Brown University, She teaches in the Bay Area and in the MFA program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. A Canadian by birth, Cole migrated via France to San Francisco where she has lived since 1977.

From Publishers Weekly

In the five sequences of San Francisco poet Norma Cole's fourth collection, "the sleep of reason/ considers progression/ gives you a sample" with "all the creatures/ tumbling out onto the tabletop of definition." Spinoza in Her Youth moves from "The Vulgar Tongue" through to "Desire & Its Double" and "Conjunctions," mixing verse and prose to trace varying forms of thought. Embedded prose poems such as "Artificial Memory" and much of the 31-page title sequence achieve a rich abstraction that extrapolates the self's refractions: "the idealization of the face/ in the year -1/ nothing but a shadow/ she so became her name/ so first, this faith, it was/ a social tool."
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About this edition

• Publisher: Omnidawn
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 1890650099
• ISBN 13: 9781890650094
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128