What Is Amazing - The Library of the Uncommons

64 pages

English language

Published 2012 by Wesleyan University Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-8195-7277-6
OCLC Number:: 13413481

Poems stunned by the world and their presence in it. Inspired by a voracious curiosity about humans and other subjects, the poems in this collection describe and invent worlds in an attempt to understand through participation. The book draws upon the wisdom of foolishness and the logic of glee, while simultaneously exploring the suffering inherent to embodied consciousness. Speakers play out moments of bravado and fear, love and mortality, disappointment and desire. They socialize incorrigibly with lakes, lovers, fire, and readers, reasoning their way to unreasonable conclusions. These poems try to understand how it is that we come to recognize and differentiate objects and beings, how wholly each is attached to its name, and which space reveals them. The collection delights in fully inhabiting its varied forms and voices, singing worlds that often coincide with our own.

1 edition

4thace reviewed What Is Amazing by Heather Christle (Wesleyan Poetry Series)

Poems not interested in setting up guardrails

4 stars

I liked this book of poems from a dozen years ago, though I spent a lot of time in a kind of dazed puzzlement, particularly in the first section. These took on a fragmentary, run-on tone, with capitalization but mostly without punctuation to give the reader help in parsing the lines into sentences. The second section had a more conventional presentation the way the sentences aligned frequently with the line breaks, but there the emotional content felt unstable with unexpected outbursts that would pop off suddenly. By the time I got to the last section I grew to notice a pattern of intrusive more-or-less unrelated phrases or images that made these little poems seem as though they were under some kind of attack. It's like when you are working with AI model and try turning up the temperature so the words start veering far from the direction the other parts …

I liked this book of poems from a dozen years ago, though I spent a lot of time in a kind of dazed puzzlement, particularly in the first section. These took on a fragmentary, run-on tone, with capitalization but mostly without punctuation to give the reader help in parsing the lines into sentences. The second section had a more conventional presentation the way the sentences aligned frequently with the line breaks, but there the emotional content felt unstable with unexpected outbursts that would pop off suddenly. By the time I got to the last section I grew to notice a pattern of intrusive more-or-less unrelated phrases or images that made these little poems seem as though they were under some kind of attack. It's like when you are working with AI model and try turning up the temperature so the words start veering far from the direction the other parts of the text have established, only these were written long before LLMs and all that. Anyway, it inspired me to write a verse of my own to play with what I discovered. These poems take on a fresh approach unlike what I have seen by other writers, and I will be looking for more recent book of poems to see what new tricks the author has come up with.