- Paperback: 96 pages
- Publisher: New Directions (Sep 27 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0811214869
- ISBN-13: 978-0811214865
- Product Dimensions: 2.3 x 1.5 x 0.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 177 g
- Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #1,551,975 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
[S]hapes a fierce, unresolvable argument of worlds and words. -- Bookforum, Robert Polito, Fall 2001
Book Description
A new collection by one of America's most respected young experimental poets. In his new collection Torn Awake, Gander continues to blend passion with intelligence, unveiling the forces of physical nature and personhood, the self as a construction of reciprocally reflective relations. Proposing models of hybridity, each of the book's major sequences develops a unique subject, rhythm, and form. Bringing to light the molten potential at the core of personality, the poems illuminate ways that language, as history read by anthropologists, discourse between lovers, gestures between parent and child, graffiti in temples, or even language as an event in itself (the very experience of words at play), incarnates presence. Addressing father and son relationships, and venerating erotic love, Gander's poems surge with vitality: the energy of active discovery. REVIEW: A sound master.... Eros presides over his generous poems that ring with the wondrous names of lowly things. (The Village Voice Literary Supplement)
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
"A New Range of Feeling",
By
This review is from: Torn Awake (Paperback)
I read quite a bit of contemporary poetry, but this book knocked me out. I had lost myself with enjoyment by the end of the first page, scribbling "Great line!" with my nubbed pencil in the margin. What can I tell you? Forrest Gander is wildly avante garde at times; you may also find him writing sonnet-sequences. Either way, you will read lines that you've never read before; and even when you have no idea what Forrest is talking about on the first read, you'll still know that this is great stuff. Subject matters range from geology to erotic love to some great explorations of father-son relationships.Each sequence is punctuated by a poem with "Love's Letter" in the title. One of these has a line which goes, "The trace on my lips of her nipples' rouge improves the taste of wine." You could likewise say that, for me, the aftertaste of "Torn Awake" improves the taste of life.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who Needs Poetry Now,
By "kelleymkkly" (Wilmington, DE) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Torn Awake (Paperback)
This book un-numbed me. Gander's trademark shifts between lyric and abstraction, between figure and ground create tensions that open the ordinary, the daily numbness which, "torn," gives voice to our exigency. Sure, he has a formidable intelligence, but when the poem suddenly shifts focus from the welter of involved thought to, for instance, a wet dog's face reflected in a hubcap, you feel a vivid, PHYSICAL recognition of the way we negotiate actual experience. That back and forth ballet takes place in each of the book's long poems. Typically, the landscape seems to orient our mode of perception. But clear images retreat as language itself comes to the forefront of our attention. And just when our attention to the EVENT of language begins to falter, we fall through the words again into recognitions of the erotic, the political, our dire and fragile world. In a way, all the poems also involve translation (of Spanish, of geology, of interactions between child and parent, etc.). It's easy to be swept into Gander's orchestrations of rhythmic movements-with an intensifying sense of what? Human presence? Gravitas? I feel summoned toward a sharper intellectual and emotional awareness where I locate an intensified possibility of myself. The title gongs: Torn Awake.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews) 8 of 10 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Who Needs Poetry Now,
By "kelleymkkly" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Torn Awake (Paperback)
This book un-numbed me. Gander's trademark shifts between lyric and abstraction, between figure and ground create tensions that open the ordinary, the daily numbness which, "torn," gives voice to our exigency. Sure, he has a formidable intelligence, but when the poem suddenly shifts focus from the welter of involved thought to, for instance, a wet dog's face reflected in a hubcap, you feel a vivid, PHYSICAL recognition of the way we negotiate actual experience. That back and forth ballet takes place in each of the book's long poems. Typically, the landscape seems to orient our mode of perception. But clear images retreat as language itself comes to the forefront of our attention. And just when our attention to the EVENT of language begins to falter, we fall through the words again into recognitions of the erotic, the political, our dire and fragile world. In a way, all the poems also involve translation (of Spanish, of geology, of interactions between child and parent, etc.). It's easy to be swept into Gander's orchestrations of rhythmic movements-with an intensifying sense of what? Human presence? Gravitas? I feel summoned toward a sharper intellectual and emotional awareness where I locate an intensified possibility of myself. The title gongs: Torn Awake.
6 of 9 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
"A New Range of Feeling",
By B - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Torn Awake (Paperback)
I read quite a bit of contemporary poetry, but this book knocked me out. I had lost myself with enjoyment by the end of the first page, scribbling "Great line!" with my nubbed pencil in the margin. What can I tell you? Forrest Gander is wildly avante garde at times; you may also find him writing sonnet-sequences. Either way, you will read lines that you've never read before; and even when you have no idea what Forrest is talking about on the first read, you'll still know that this is great stuff. Subject matters range from geology to erotic love to some great explorations of father-son relationships.Each sequence is punctuated by a poem with "Love's Letter" in the title. One of these has a line which goes, "The trace on my lips of her nipples' rouge improves the taste of wine." You could likewise say that, for me, the aftertaste of "Torn Awake" improves the taste of life. |
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