Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive and admired poets. Since the mid-1970s, she has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. By turns elegiac, fierce, and sensuous, her musically-charged poems subvert distinctions between narrative coherence and fragmentary elision, between outward attention and inward response. Throughout, Lauterbach questions the hope for personal agency within proliferating fields of cultural and historical event. If In Time brings together selections from each of her first five collections, as well as an exhilarating group of new poems.
A scintillating collection of essays on language from one of literature's most supple minds In The Night Sky, her first work of essays, acclaimed poet Ann Lauterbach writes of the ways in which art and poetry are integral and necessary to human conversation. At the center of the book is a series of seven essays, by turns meditative and polemical, that articulate the interstices between Lauterbach's poetics and her experience. She advocates an active encounter with language, at once imaginative and practical, and argues for the importance of art to the well- being of a democratic society. Lauterbach's "nimble and glittering" (Booklist) writings bring us to a new understanding of the relationship between self-knowledge and cultural meaning, as well as demonstrating the ways in which contemporary philosophy and theory might be integrated with practical knowledge.
Ann Lauterbach's ninth work of poetry, Or to Begin Again, takes its name from a sixteen-poem elegy that resists its own end, as it meditates on the nearness of specific attachment and loss against the mute background of historical forces in times of war. In the center of the book is a twelve-part narrative, "Alice in the Wasteland,"inspired by Lewis Carroll's great character and T.S. Eliot's 1922 modernist poem. Alice is accosted by an invisible Voice as she wanders and wonders about the nature of language in relation to perception. In this volume, Lauterbach again shows the range of her formal inventiveness, demonstrating the visual dynamics of the page in tandem with the powerful musical cadences and imagery of a contemporary master.
Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by LitHub A new collection of vivid, personal and provocative work from the author of Or to Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in poetry In Ann Lauterbach's eleventh collection, the image of a Door recurs across several poems, as she considers the perpetual dialogue between what is open and what is shut for each of us. The Door is a threshold between the inner landscape of memory, thought, imagination and dream and the outer so-called real world, which increasingly comes to us through technology's lens, displacing and distorting our sense of intimacy, presence and relation. What is near, and what is far away? She asks about the efficacy of language itself, when confronted by the urgent uncertainties of contemporary experience.
From Before Recollection: TRANSCENDENTAL POSTCARD Ann Lauterbach The outlook such that time is told on waking, Without aid of cock or clock's crow. In fact all the birds are elsewhere, Poised on glossy page or in some fall Migration. Sun up over mountain is precision, Then mist travels, exhaling day. All else, all change, is air, Dew relenting on the blades And mirror rhymes Where water bears resemblance: A strut of hues to pale even Revlon's alchemy and, In the center of its glaze, a cauldron of sky-cast blue.
Ann Lauterbach considers the animated, elastic relation between what is given and what is chosen through the lens of art, critical thinking and her own experience as a poet. More meditation than argument, the essay brings to focus compelling ideas and questions surrounding the significance of art for the contemporary world.
“Ann Lauterbach’s Saint Petersburg Notebook investigates both the psychic landscape and character of the post-soviet human and the travelling writer’s own estrangement from self and time during the white nights. Her observations of Russians’ muteness or lack of expressivity, the hollowness of their cultural spine, and their desire to be superficially European strangely echo the Marquis de Custine’s 19th-century critical travelogue. The porous space of Petersburg, cast in oblique light, is palpable as an unsettling dream in this brief, haunted notebook.”— Matvei Yankelevich, translator of Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms
A new collection from the author of Or To Begin Again, a finalist for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most innovative and provocative poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous and intellectually charged poems. In this, her ninth book of poems, Lauterbach pursues longstanding inquiries into how language forms and informs our understanding of the relation between empirical observation and subjective response; worldly attachment and inwardness; the given and the chosen. The poems set out not so much to find cogent resolutions to these fluid dyads as to open them to the fact of unknowing that is at the core of all human curiosity and desire. A central prose section tracks along a meditative edge, engaging the risky task of opening the mind to the limits of apprehension; the final section evokes, in the figure of the instructor, the essential contemporary question of how information becomes knowledge.
The installation examined here transformed the ground-floor gallery of the Dia Center for the Arts into one of Jessica Stockholder's fantastical, quasi-architectural environments.
“When you first view Rose-Lynn Fisher’s photographs, you might think you’re looking down at the world from an airplane, at dunes, skyscrapers or shorelines. In fact, you’re looking at her tears. . . . [There’s] poetry in the idea that our emotional terrain bears visual resemblance to the physical world; that our tears can look like the vistas we see out an airplane window. Fisher’s images are the only remaining trace of these places, which exist during a moment of intense feeling—and then vanish.” —NPR“[A] delicate, intimate book. . . . In The Topography of Tears photographer Rose-Lynn Fisher shows us a place where language strains to express grief, longing, pride, frustration, joy, the confrontation with something beautiful, the confrontation with an onion.” —Boston GlobeDoes a tear shed while chopping onions look different from a tear of happiness? In this powerful collection of images, an award-winning photographer trains her optical microscope and camera on her own tears and those of men, women, and children, released in moments of grief, pain, gratitude, and joy, and captured upon glass slides. These duotone photographs reveal the beauty of recurring patterns in nature and present evocative, crystalline imagery for contemplation. Underscored by poetic captions, they translate the mysterious act of crying into an atlas mapping the structure and magnificence of our interior lives.Rose-Lynn Fisher is an artist and author of the International Photography Award-winning studies Bee and The Topography of Tears. Her photographs are exhibited in galleries, festivals, and museums across the world and have been featured by the Dr. Oz Show, NPR, Smithsonian, Harper’s, New Yorker, Time, Wired, Reader’s Digest, Discover, Brain Pickings, and elsewhere. She received her BFA from Otis Art Institute and lives in Los Angeles.
