Present Tense - Softcover

Rabinowitz, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890650455 ISBN 13: 9781890650452

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2010

Synopsis

Present Tense is a tour de force, a book-length poetic project that is anatomy, history, testimony, eulogy, and divining rod of our constantly evolving present. In four acts, Rabinowitz dramatizes not only our various socio-religious-political ecosystems but also the myriad echoes of those systems that resound in our psyches and permeate our thoughts. Through dialogue, reportage, Biblical reference, interview, famous speech, infamous cultural and historical events and more, Rabinowitz offers readers an arresting account of who and what we are as humans―in all of our darkness and our brilliance. This poetry―with its invigorating breadth and shocking immediacy―compels its readers' full engagement with the page, an interaction that incites us to examine our own position and potential in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of the actual, as we experience it moment by moment.

About this title

About the Author

ANNA RABINOWITZ has published three books of poetry, The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders, Tupelo, 2006, Darkling, Tupelo, 2001 (which will be translated into German and published by Luxbooks, Wesibaden, Germany, forthcoming 2010), and At the Site of Inside Out, University of Mass. Press 1997. Darkling was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Best Poetry Book of 2001 Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2002, and At the Site of Inside Out was a winner of the Juniper Prize. American Opera Projects transformed Darkling into an experimental opera-theatre work that blurs distinctions between poetry, theater, and music. This production had its world premiere to great critical acclaim on February 26, 2006 at the 13th St. Theatre, NYC. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2001, Anna Rabinowitz has published widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, Verse, and Doubletake. Her work has also been reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, The KGB Bar Reader, The Poets' Grimm, Poetry Daily, and Poetry After 9/11.

Reviews

The notes section in Rabinowitz's fourth collection—a searing book-length poem in four parts—reveals the great range of historic individuals and texts quoted and reworked: among them, Woody Allen, Sun Tsu, Chief Seattle, the Book of Proverbs, and declassified CIA counterintelligence interrogation manuals. One poem imagines Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein in dialogue on the menace of war, a central concern here. Rabinowitz (The Wanton Sublime) candidly unloads her outrage and despair at humanity's violent and destructive impulses, and throughout offers an unbridled account of an apocalypse-in-the-now, replete with battalions of wound; Weepdirge and bleat of denuded trees; and Blustery discord of harmonic debris. Her imagery and argument, bearing witness to grizzly gunfire and mortgaged mayhem of markets, can at times feel heavy-handed and frenzied. But this seems to be precisely her point—our times demand a raised voice. Testimony is a cryptic relic deformed by the violence of authority, writes Rabinowitz, who depicts a live-action struggle to resist such deformation and to speak openly about the horrors of contemporary life. (June)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Omnidawn
• Publication date: 2010
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1890650455
• ISBN 13: 9781890650452
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 120