Model City

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

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.