Allegory of the Supermarket: Poems (The Contemporary Poetry Ser.) - Softcover

Brown, Stephanie

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820320684 ISBN 13: 9780820320687

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 1999

Synopsis

Stephanie Brown offers a hint of something curiously ominous through the sly epigraph she chooses from Henry James―"The amount of thought they give to their clothing, the people who are afraid of looking frivolous!" But we should already have known something unsettling was about to happen from this book's title, which suggests the devastating playfulness at work in these poems. One poem deals with vacationing librarians: "it's not so simple that we're prim and went to the exotic / Though perhaps that's what the story really is." What the story "really is" is sometimes what it seems but with a twist; and it is sometimes so ironically envisioned you would hardly believe this was California. These poems are indeed allegorical, but this is a thoroughly modern allegory dealing with a frighteningly up-to-date set of situations.

About this title

About the Author:

STEPHANIE BROWN lives in San Clemente, California. Her poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Pavement, and Yellow Silk.

From Kirkus Reviews:

Despite some obvious clinkers, this first collection is often very entertaining, which is no easy feat these days: sly and sexy, dry and ironic, jaded and funny, Brown catches you off guard with her playground rhymes and street-song repetitions. And her titles are often a hoot in themselves: I Was a Phony Baloney!, No, No Nostalgia!, Mommy Is a Scary Narcissist, and so on. But the humor isnt all one-note jokes and giggly post-feminist wise-cracks. Many of her character studies verge on diatribe, yet still bear the empathy of one whos been there, done that: in Feminine Intuition, she mocks and mourns female fad- followers, bitter singles, and brittle old ladies; and Five Sketches are spare, cutting portraits of a professional woman, an earth mother, and a Miss America type, with references to legendary difficult women like Mary McCarthy and Clare Luce. Other knowing poems goof on a woman obsessed with working out (a gargoyle for the Age of the Physically Fit); criticize the lipo- sucked; and scorn the sentimentalists (Warm, Fuzzy). Browns wit and anger also target men: the seducers and flatterers, the self-satisfied suburbanites and the beer-gutted bores. Prose poems, a few of which first appeared in the high-brow porno mag Yellow Silk, chart the poets desires through puberty, graduate school, and a near-lesbian encounter, with her eventually abandoning lust for simple sacrifice order and love. It feels a bit padded, but this welcome debut announces a voice both smart and original. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0820320684
• ISBN 13: 9780820320687
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 104