Model City

Donna Stonecipher

ISBN 10: 1848613881 / ISBN 13: 9781848613881

Published by Shearsman Books, GB, 2015

About this Item

Model City answers its own inaugural question 'What was it like?' in 288 different ways. The accumulation of these answers offers a form of sustained and refined negative capability, which by turns is wry, profound and abundant with an unspecified longing for the passing ghost of European idealism. In the various enquiries and explorations of Model City this is also the mapping of a lived condition and its relationships not readily found on every street corner - nor in the broken ideologies from the populist bargain basement proffered by our political cadres. What becomes apparent is that the model city/Model City exists by virtue of a poet's wit and inventiveness, in its accomplished and elegantly measured language. Stonecipher's mesmerizing, epigrammatic fables establish the off-centre polis where, oddly, we find ourselves at home. - Kelvin Corcoran.

Seller Inventory # LU-9781848613881

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Model City
• Publisher: Shearsman Books, GB
• Publication Date: 2015
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1848613881
• ISBN 13: 9781848613881
• Binding: Paperback
• Condition: New
• Weight: 165 grams

About this title

Synopsis

Poetry. "MODEL CITY is built from a missing antecedent, an "it" as mysterious as it is familiar: What was it like? What was what like? One's life? The city from which one fled? The city to which one did so? The last century? The one before that? The weaving in and out of traffic? Love? Candlelight from a curtained window or the dull, digital glow of a smart phone from the balcony below? Here, those old utopic dreams and social experiments collide with the age of excess information, leaving behind broken bits of experience: precise, exacting, aphoristic, arresting - the emotional residue of just how one deals with one's tiny-cog-in-a-big- machine conundrum allowed to curdle into language as concerned with form and structure, with feats of architecture and engineering, as it is with real human relationships. This book is a marvel."—Noah Eli Gordon

About the Author

Donna Stonecipher is the author of four books of poetry: The Reservoir (winner of the Contemporary Poetry Series competition, 2002); SOUVENIR DE CONSTANTINOPLE (Instance Press, 2007); THE COSMOPOLITAN (Coffee House Press, 2008), winner of the National Poetry Series; and MODEL CITY (Shearsman Books, 2015). Her poems have been published in many journals, including Conjunctions, New American Writing, and The Paris Review, and have been translated into six languages. She lives in Berlin, Germany.