Full Description
"[Wolff's poems] are stylistic and tonal shapeshifters. Hip, contemplative, and dark and resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive, they're unnerving, funny, and occasionally subversive."-Bookforum Poet, novelist, and Fence Books founder Rebecca Wolff's internal monologue made external in poetry is uncanny. Her musical and darkly funny fourth collection, One Morning-, spans language, culture, art history, love, passion, grief, consumerism, environmental devastation, and the ekphrastic experience of pop and high culture. She experiments with torque, energy, narrative-two steps ahead of herself with the reader on her heels. From "Today Is a Good Day to Fly (Life Begins at)": I'm really digging this blue sky after so much rain with my regular menstrual cycle my Def Jam progesterone cream the blow-in (in my pocket) (ripped out) from in-flight music magazine "touching cloth" like the Romantics do. Insert jitney. Rebecca Wolff is the author of four collections of poetry, one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose. Her first book, Manderley, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky.
Her second, Figment, was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Claudia Rankine and Eavan Boland. Her third, The King, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. Her novel The Beginners was published by Riverhead in 2011. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1998, Wolff founded the influential literary journal Fence; in 2001 she founded Fence Books and launched The Constant Critic website. Wolff lives in Hudson, New York, and is currently a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.
Contents
I
Arcadia (et in . . . est)
One morning—
The Reductions
Seeming inevitability
Retreat from Likeness
Ekphrastic
From Where I'm Situated
Ecco Ekphrastic
Stockholder
II
Let's consider this a
Palisades
How Spooky Is It
Man Tits
Tuck In, Vermont
Buncha Corporate Trash
Bumper Sticker
Mad as Hell/Not Going To Take It
Abs
Short Sight
I approach a purchase
Greed You Cannot Think About (Sneaking Sally through the Alley)
Antiques Roadshow (Nounz 2 Verbz)
Use Objects: Boise Art Museum 2009
GDP
Applies to Apple
Fronting
The Ungovernable
III
The Curious Life and Mysterious Death of Peter J. Perry
IV
Admit No Impediment
A million metaphors
Poor Mr. Rochester
Master Mind
Church on the Hill
The Things That I Do
What happened
Everpresence
Parkeresque
Let Your Secrets Die with Me
Moon, June
You're the smartest cat I know
Homeowner
Warden
Romance
V
Dark Roads
It was while watching Jane Eyre
Irony is the salt of life (I'd trade it in for gold)
Today Is A Good Day to Fly (Life Begins at)
Ian Curtis
An authorized biography of (little) JA
Remains
And when I say poem
windowless structure
Am I Special
Rhythm "and" the Human Body
The Nightingale (sound of music)
VI
Visions of Never Being Heard from Again
What are they doing here
The Social
Unfailingly
Poetics Department: A Mockery
In The
You'd have had to have had
Acknowledgements
