What Sparks Poetry: Soham Patel on Language as Form
"Place is a process with past(s), present(s), and future(s) that, according to geographer Doreen Massey, can be fragmented, dislocated, forgotten and reformed. Massey’s thinking through place in this era of super speedy space-time compression helps shape my sense of a poem’s ability to attend to place as an unending yet impermanent entity. A poem is a place where space-time compression must occur, and why place in all its durations inspires me." |
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"The Desperate Housewife Whose Face Launched a Thousand Ships"
"What Zoccola achieves, while intermittently comic, is in fact quite searching in its explorations of a young Southern housewife (Menelaus is known as 'the Big Cheese' in this book) who has her first child, a daughter, at the age of 21. The poems speak not only in the voice of Helen, but also in the voices of a chorus of 'the Spartan women' gossiping about Helen and even in the voice of a god who may be the inseminating swan observing his own daughter."
viaTHE NEW YORK TIMES |
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