Present Tense - Softcover

Rabinowitz, Anna

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1890650455 ISBN 13: 9781890650452

Publisher: Omnidawn, 2010

Synopsis

Divided into four acts, this innovative book-length poem assesses culture at large and exposes the constellating force of historical, biblical, and social influences on the human community. Sharp and intelligent, this tour de force incorporates dialogues, reports, Biblical references, interviews, famous speeches, and infamous cultural and historical events. Dramatizing various socio-religious-political ecosystems, the poem studies the echoes of those systems on the psyches and thoughts of the universal human community. Showing humanity in all its darkness and brilliance, the hybrid poem will appeal to those interested in poetry and cultural studies.

About this title

About the Author

Anna Rabinowitz is an award-winning writer of three collections of poetry: At the Site of Inside Out, Darkling, and The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders. Her work has been published in numerous journals, including Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Paris Review, Southwest Review, Sulfur, and Verse and in the anthologies The Best American Poetry, The KGB Bar Reader, Life on the Line, Poetry After 9/11, Poetry Daily, and The Poets’ Grimm. She lives in New York City.

From Publishers Weekly

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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About this edition

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