In her dazzling third volume of poetry,
The Wanton Sublime, Anna Rabinowitz creates nothing short of a new genre of utterance as she cuts through pieties and myths to get at the essential humanity of the Virgin Mary, and, ultimately, of all women.
The Wanton Sublime is an ""anthology"" of texts and commentaries that propels us on a breathtaking journey mapped by questions, conversations, and speculationsa journey to the very foundations of womanhood and motherhood.
Again and again Mary, exemplar of the feminine, quintessential mother, bearer/birther of divinity is re-visioned and re-defined; she is made kindred to Io, to Europa and to an ancient Egyptian woman who may have been the first unflinchingly assertive feminist. Rabinowitz investigates Mary as concept and as fact, as symbol and as flesh-and-blood female.
What does it mean to be chosen? How does one engage with otherness? What forces operate when one's life is interrupted? Are there possibilities of alternative narratives? How does one process the condition of not knowing? Linguistically brilliant and stylistically inventive, this daring work makes the universal particular, the particular universal.
The Wanton Sublime explores the burden, the dilemma and the glory of being chosen as it leads us to a renewed appreciation of what it means to be alive and a woman.
Anna Rabinowitz's work has appeared widely in such journals as
Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, and
Doubletake. Her work has also appeared in the anthologies,
The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall,
Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, and in
The KGB Bar Reader. She edits and publishes the nationally distributed literary journal,
American Letters & Commentary, and is a vice-president of the Poetry Society of America.
Anna Rabinowitz's most recent volume of poetry is The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders (Tupelo Press, 2006). Her book-length acrostic poem, Darkling: A Poem, also available from Tupelo Press, has been adapted into an experimental, multi-media music theater work by American Opera Projects and had a limited run from February 26 through March 18, 2006 at the 13th Street Theatre, NYC, with a gala opening night on February 28, 2006. Excerpts from this theater work, along with panel discussions, were presented at the Guggenheim Museum in November, 2005. Rabinowitz's other books include At the Site of Inside Out, which won the Juniper Prize.
