A01=Jessica Greenbaum
Abortion
Adaptation
Admiration
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
Alley
Anemia
Apartment
Author_Jessica Greenbaum
Autobiography
automatic-update
Autonomy
Bed
Bedroom
Begonia
Boat
Bookcase
Bulb
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=DCF
Chainsaw
Chandelier
COP=United States
Currency
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
Determination
Dilation and curettage
Dinner
Door
Dyspnea
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_poetry
Fear of bats
Flashing (weatherproofing)
Floater
Frisson
Headline
Hermann Hesse
HIV
Homesickness
Hypoesthesia
Into the Darkness (novel)
Kibbutz
Language_English
Laundry
Log cabin
Long hair
Lower East Side
Lunch
Milk bottle
Miscarriage
Ovarian cyst
PA=Available
Passover
Poetry
Posture (psychology)
Pregnancy
Price_€10 to €20
PS=Active
Raynaud's phenomenon
Reason
Reconnaissance
Robbie (short story)
Rodent
S. (Dorst novel)
Sashimi
Side effect
Sleep
softlaunch
Sonnet
Spring Rain
Stairs
Storefront
Strobe light
Sump
Sweater
Talmud
Tay-Sachs disease
Their Child
Thought
Tire
Wildflower
Williamsburg Bridge
Window box
Yarn
Product details
- ISBN 9780691156637
- Weight: 136g
- Dimensions: 152 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 30 Sep 2012
- Publisher: Princeton University Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
- Language: English
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
This is the second collection from a Brooklyn poet whose work many readers will know from the New Yorker. Jessica Greenbaum's narrative poems, in which objects and metaphor share highest honors, attempt revelation through close observation of the everyday. Written in "plain American that cats and dogs can read," as Marianne Moore phrased it, these contemporary lyrics bring forward the challenges of Wis?awa Szymborska, the reportage of Yehuda Amichai, and the formal forays of Marilyn Hacker. The book asks at heart: how does life present itself to us, and how do we create value from our delights and losses? Riding on Kenneth Koch's instruction to "find one true feeling and hang on," The Two Yvonnes overtakes the present with candor, meditation, and the classic aspiration to shape lyric into a lasting force. Moving from 1960s Long Island, to 1980s Houston, to today's Brooklyn, the poems range in subject from the pages of the Talmud to a squirrel trapped in a kitchen.
One tells the story of young lovers "warmed by the rays / Their pelvic bones sent over the horizon of their belts," while another describes the Bronx Zoo in winter, where the giraffes pad about "like nurses walking quietly / outside a sick room." Another poem defines the speaker via a "packing slip" of her parts--"brown eyes, brown hair, from hirsute tribes in Poland and Russia." The title poem, in which the speaker and friends stumble through a series of flawed memories about each other, unearths the human vulnerabilities that shape so much of the collection. ______ From The Two Yvonnes: WHEN MY DAUGHTER GOT SICK Jessica Greenbaum Her cries impersonated all the world; The fountain's bubbling speech was just a trick But still I turned and looked, as she implored, Or leaned toward muffled noises through the bricks: Just radio, whose waves might be her wav- ering, whose pitch might be her quavering, I turned toward, where, the sirens might be "Save Me," "Help me," "Mommy, Mommy"--everything She, too, had said, since sloughing off the world.
She took to bed, and now her voice stays fused To air like outlines of a bygone girl; The streets, the lake, the room--just places bruised Without her form, the way your sheets still hold Rough echoes of the risen sleeper, cold.
Jessica Greenbaum is the author of the award-winning poetry collection Inventing Difficulty. Her poems and essays have appeared in the New Yorker, the Nation, Poetry, Southwest Review, and elsewhere. She is the poetry editor of upstreet.
