TEXT(ISLES) - Softcover

Kassell, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1939929059 ISBN 13: 9781939929051

Publisher: Dos Madres Press, 2013

Synopsis

Poetry. "Nancy Kassell's new (and first) collection TEXT(ISLES) is mature, humane, truly learned. The poems, unique, accurate, beautiful, are a model of emotional intelligence. Their context is as multidimensional as life and history itself. They evoke the classical world—Horace, Ovid, Aeneas, myth revisited; they introduce a woman-friendly world especially in their focus on the significance and language of cloth, of sewing, of pattern and texture; they 'translate' music (Brahms, Bach), painting (Klee, Soutine), art history; they explore sky, earth, water, cellular life; they evoke the centrality of love. Like the title, the poems fragment and reconcile the worlds they create. Myth and metaphor and 'reality' are interchangeable—and fresh. 'It is no news,/ that we have to reinvent ourselves/ again and again./ Unless we've already given up,/ the light over the drawing board/ is always on.' There is reassurance in the scope and beauty of TEXT(ISLES), hope in its minutest details."—Sondra Zeidenstein

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Kassell (b. 1936, Albany, New York) earned a PhD in Classics from the University of California-Berkeley. She taught Greek and Latin languages and literatures at the University of Pennsylvania, Boston University, and UMass-Boston, and published articles on Horace and Ovid. She is also the author of a feminist cultural study, The Pythia on Ellis Island: Rethinking the Greco-Roman Legacy in America. Kassell turned to writing her own poetry some twenty years ago. Her poems are forthcoming in Speaking for my Self: Women Poets in their Seventies and Eighties (Chicory Blue Press), and have been published in the anthologies Verse and Universe, Poems about Science and Mathematics, and Family Reunion: Poems about Parenting Grown Children, and in literary journals (Notre Dame Review, BORDERLANDS, Eclipse, Willow Springs, Salamander and others). She is also the author of essays in The Road Retaken: Women Reenter the Academy, When a Lifemate Dies, and in the New York Times. She was a founding member of The Writers' Room of Boston. She lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dos Madres Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1939929059
• ISBN 13: 9781939929051
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 84