July - Softcover

Ossip, Kathleen

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1946448788 ISBN 13: 9781946448781

Publisher: Sarabande Books, 2021

Synopsis

In her groundbreaking and most politicized collection, Kathleen Ossip takes a hard look at the U.S.A. as it now stands. She meditates on our various responses to our country―whether ironic, infantile, righteous, or defeated. Her diction is both high and low, her tone both elegant and straightforward. The book’s crowning achievement, its anchor, and its centerpiece is the poem “July.” In a generous fifty pages, Ossip recounts a road trip from Bemidji, MN, to Key West, FL, with her daughter riding shotgun. Inspired by images that flick across their car windows and nurtured by intimate conversation and plenty of time to think, the poem has an entertaining cinematic sweep. There are poems based on bumper stickers, the names of churches, little shops. Traveling tests her beliefs, and Ossip fully discloses her doubts and confusions. Ossip is an unconventional, mighty magician with words.

About this title

About the Author

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Do-Over, a New York Times Editors' Choice; The Cold War, which was one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2011; The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. She teaches at The New School in New York, and she has been a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Goddess


1. {Trump wins; Muri cries; I decide to read Paradiso as antidote} The moon was very halved. The girl on the phone sobbed I didn’t think it could happen. All nature and human nature seemed halved in one quick night. She had canvassed and canvassed, a behavior we believed artistic. The hammered throng mobbed the hotel ballroom, glared and danced: picture of an evil species, bareassed. And sloppy greed for the easy fix, the dumbest. And I too dumb to see a fix. The future lost its color. When Dante climbed away from the vile circles, he swapped saints for criminals and the lines pushed onward, duller. Dull or not, I craved rigor. I crowdsourced a translation. I found dull Paradiso online and clicked on one iteration.

Edition details

• Publisher: Sarabande Books
• Publication date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1946448788
• ISBN 13: 9781946448781
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 120