Nightboat Books
Questions? info@nightboat.org
The Lives of A Spirit / Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken — By FANNY HOWE
In this brilliant work that transcends genre—lyric essay, prose poem, philosophical fiction—Fanny Howe pursues her realization that keen metaphysical inquiry is radically essential to everyday life. Howe adds the stunning new coda Glasstown: Where Something Got Broken to her earlier work The Lives of a Spirit. The quotidian brushes up against the infinite in her ongoing effort to answer ancient quetions: "Little word, who said me? Am I owned or free?"
Praise for FANNY HOWE:
"Fanny Howe employs a sometimes fierce, always passionate, spareness in her lifelong parsing of the exchange between matter and spirit." —Michael Palmer
"With extraordinary self-scrutiny and complexity—and unmatchable musical poise and beauty—Fanny Howe examines our relationship with 'other' worlds, purgatories of various kinds: genetic, historical, theological." —Jorie Graham
"Howe is always an unpretentious pilgrim...I trust her as much as I have ever trusted anyone." —Rae Armantrout
The Truant Lover — By JULIET PATTERSON
Winner of the 2004 NIGHTBOAT POETRY PRIZE
Chosen by National Book Award Winner, Jean Valentine
Juliet Patterson incorporates the voices of Emily Dickinson, Lorine Niedecker, and Wallace Stevens, drawing into her stunning debut a fascination with the difficult, the improbable, and the uneasy. There is a quiet ferocity to mourn the world's injustice and a passion in her work expressing the perplexities of love, grace, and consciousness. For all their easy fluency of detail and lyrical meticulousness, they are poems not intended for the faint-hearted; they are tough, and unsparing, offering for our consolation only their scrupulous precision.
Praise for The Truant Lover:
Of her book, Jean Valentine wrote, "Juliet Patterson's poems are entirely themselves; they use time and the eye and tongue — all the body, as thought and insight, inside and outside history. The Truant Lover is a marvel."
Spare, pastoral, intimate, and probing, these musically exacting poems offer arresting insights: "Here's a world for today: // killing & not dying / fantastically, not lying." They question, invent, refer, divert, take flying risks. They are fluid, considered, dignified. They celebrate the human eye, mind, and tongue. It is a joy to have them in print. —Olga Broumas
Anyone can use the fragment, but only a few know how to make it do what it’s supposed to — pierce the heart. And once inside the heart, Juliet Patterson can go anywhere & everywhere, & does. Where she comes from is as close as you will ever get to that midnight trembling inside the sweet whiplash of a tongue. This is poetry you can pick a lock with. Your lock. Terrific. —David Rivard
In the 31 poems of Patterson's debut (also the first full-length collection from Nightboat Books), stories create the experiences they narrate: "As in the parable, the truant lover / arrived." Speaking in a clinical, yet vulnerable voice, Patterson seeks to delineate "I" from "eye": "I in the form of my own urging, eye / in its movement follows the body's future / path." Patterson's style foregrounds the visual, and the book is rife with references to visual artists. Lines are also lifted from poets including Lorine Niedecker, Brenda Shaughnessy and Donald Revel, emphasizing the connection of the senses and the arts. Patterson's search for self-knowledge often threatens violence as well: "A book is a huge cemetery." Yet this same force also preserves life: "Members breeding / on poisonous members // store the poisons / for their own defense." Patterson has crafted a far reaching first book that blends self-interrogation with metaphysical inquiry. Both Patterson and Nightboat show great promise. —Publisher's Weekly
To Enter the Nightboat Poetry Prize: Click Here!
         |
NIGHTBOAT BOOKS
303 E. 8th Street, #B1 · New York, NY 10009 · Email: info@nightboat.org
