Unfinished Building (First Edition)

Toby Olson

ISBN 10: 1566890098 / ISBN 13: 9781566890090

Published by Coffee House Press, 1993

About this Item

Coffee House Press, 1993. First edition. First printing. Poetry. Paperbound original. New, in illustrated stiff wraps. 0.0.

Seller Inventory # 1286

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Unfinished Building (First Edition)
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Publication Date: 1993
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1566890098
• ISBN 13: 9781566890090
• Binding: Soft cover
• Edition: 1st Edition.
• Condition: As New
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Seller catalogs:
  • Poetry

About this title

Synopsis

"Many of these powerfully pirouetting, lyrical narratives are long and lean and muscled with conundrums. Olson's poetry becomes jazz as he performs myriad variations on a theme."--Booklist

Reviews

A creative writing teacher (Temple Univ.), poet, and novelist, Olson gathers "all living things in chaos" in his capacious, narrow-lined poems. Before one is aware of it, a conversational, witty poem, nuanced with the mundane, becomes a meditation on life's deeper needs, the difficulty of finding a "sense of direction," the pain of "warped" love and "animal darkness," and the grim, distorted "waves" of memories merging with associations so transparent they "burn the tissues." Half-allusive renditions of human consciousness, these poems, sometimes inquisitive, sometimes overburdened, pursue "crossed and broken patterns" among shifting appearances--"a crazy cycle we can't read/ although we apprehend/ configuration of its form." As on a fever chart of complex disturbances of daily life, the needle of Olson's poetry traces "small and subtle shifts of meaning" and documents "losses and traps" in "the quiet/ certain nature of our love, our lives." For most collections.
- Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.