Softly Undercover: The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize
Autor Hanae Jonasen Limba Engleză Paperback – 14 feb 2024
From its opening insistence on “not love but procedure,” Hanae Jonas’s Softly Undercover explores the possibilities and limitations of ritual and repetition, asking what it means to believe and see clearly. Formally rangy poems map out territories of devotion and divination, contrasting the realm of mystery, dreams, and symbols with the alienation of the mundane. Against a backdrop of intimate relationships, small towns, rural landscapes, and claustrophobic interiors, Jonas casts her gaze on isolation, nostalgia, repression, visibility, and loss while examining the desire “to go anywhere more docile / than facts.” Animated by uncertainty, this elliptical and lyrical debut dwells in the pleasures and hazards of illusion.
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Specificații
ISBN-13: 9780814258941
ISBN-10: 0814258948
Pagini: 72
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 5 mm
Greutate: 0.11 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize
ISBN-10: 0814258948
Pagini: 72
Dimensiuni: 152 x 229 x 5 mm
Greutate: 0.11 kg
Editura: Ohio State University Press
Colecția Mad Creek Books
Seria The Journal Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize
Recenzii
“In Softly Undercover, lyric’s devotional mode is both thrall and throe: the powerlessness and pain of being in relation to a higher power, of being ‘a constant / hostage to mystery.’ These masterful poems make stringent, witty music. ‘Three times removed / from any grip on home,’ Hanae Jonas writes, ‘which place is the real life?’ Instead of answers, the stark beauty of these lyrics offers just enough succor to sustain the ardent devotion of us, ‘the earthly alone.’” —Brian Teare
“Language itself is the protagonist in these spell-woven poems, simultaneously soliciting and fending off the sharp outlines we mistake for understanding. ‘I’m coming down with morning,’ says their speaker, as though it were an illness. Hanae Jonas is after nothing less than the springs of consciousness here and firmly turns her back on paraphrasables. A bold and absorbing debut.” —Linda Gregerson
“Softly Undercover is a stunning collection that carefully shapes isolation, sorrow, fracture, and uncertainty into original imagery and sonic nuance, inducing a breathlessness with its candid, valiant pauses and admissions. It casts society’s procedures and the haunted flourishes of the soul in remarkable light.” —Marcus Jackson, Charles B. Wheeler Poetry Prize judge
Notă biografică
Hanae Jonas is the author of the chapbook Lowlands. She was born in Vermont and lives in Los Angeles.
Extras
CURSORY DETAILS
The bar fairly quiet, circling
around sexual. We sip
just water for hours
to keep the racehorse
at bay. The horse goes to sleep
but the man drives me home
anyway, asks
can we try it the next week.
The marauders in my throat
and their love
of acquiescence. I sit
on my steps like a child
who hasn’t yet learned
to make her misery
an ornament; a centerfold
of the month to ripple
gaudy as swans.
What details would add
to your pleasure?
I’m just sick
in the hush
out here, not even
furniture
to keep me company.
AGAINST RITUAL
My devotion, a bad joke
pulled taut around. It’s true
I loved the distance of stars
over what was obvious
down here. Flush
with the feeling of words
and no mouth to shape anything.
But who cared about that—
Not the heat with its brazen
hissing at night.
Its crescendo swelled
towards something important
but did I pick out the paramount thing?
I wanted to know
how to do fate right,
wanted to be her
numinous dog.
Maybe it’s all a guess
said the night itself,
shrinking back into nothing.
I felt myself accept
this version
which would stand the test
of syrup, of innocence.
And it’s true I was laughing
but couldn’t stop insisting
on the starlit murmurs,
good grief,
good god.
The bar fairly quiet, circling
around sexual. We sip
just water for hours
to keep the racehorse
at bay. The horse goes to sleep
but the man drives me home
anyway, asks
can we try it the next week.
The marauders in my throat
and their love
of acquiescence. I sit
on my steps like a child
who hasn’t yet learned
to make her misery
an ornament; a centerfold
of the month to ripple
gaudy as swans.
What details would add
to your pleasure?
I’m just sick
in the hush
out here, not even
furniture
to keep me company.
AGAINST RITUAL
My devotion, a bad joke
pulled taut around. It’s true
I loved the distance of stars
over what was obvious
down here. Flush
with the feeling of words
and no mouth to shape anything.
But who cared about that—
Not the heat with its brazen
hissing at night.
Its crescendo swelled
towards something important
but did I pick out the paramount thing?
I wanted to know
how to do fate right,
wanted to be her
numinous dog.
Maybe it’s all a guess
said the night itself,
shrinking back into nothing.
I felt myself accept
this version
which would stand the test
of syrup, of innocence.
And it’s true I was laughing
but couldn’t stop insisting
on the starlit murmurs,
good grief,
good god.
Cuprins
Rhododendrons The View Ritual for Spelling Silence Bluff Line Apparent Threshold Lowlands As Above Aubade Denials Then the Night in Me Woke Up Luminous Crisis Homing Good Ritual in the Aftermath Dead Lexicon Cursory Details What Beauty With Stones as Their Witness Private Party Everything That Acts Is Actual Version with Sudden End Against Ritual Venus Retrograde Lupines Künstlerroman Body of Evidence Stinging Nettle The Glow Dusk Ritual for a Back Room Imagining a Forest by the Sea Delinquents It Says Nothing Imagining a Forest by the Sea
Descriere
An elliptical, lyrical debut that explores the pleasures and hazards of ritual, devotion, divination, and illusion, examining what it means to believe.