Kirjahaku

H.D. & Bryher: An Untold Love Story of Modernism takes on the daring task of examining the connection between two queer women, one a poet and the other a historical novelist, living from the late 19th century through the 20th century. When they met in 1918, H.D. was a modernist poet, married to a shell-shocked adulterous poet, and pregnant by another man. She fell in love with Bryher, who was entrapped by her wealthy secretive family. Their bond grew over Greek poetry, geography, ancient history and literature, the telegraph, and telepathy. They felt their love-and their true identities existed invisibly- a giddy, and disturbing element to their relationship; they lived off and on in distant geographies, though in near continual contact. This book exposes why literary history has occluded this love story of the world wars and poetic modernism.

Elizabeth Bishop represents a full-scale examination of Bishop's work—poetry, prose, and selected unpublished material—to reveal how personal loss becomes implicated in her vision of self as fluid and unfixed and, at the same time, how gender and sexual identity inform the experience of loss in the act of writing. Susan McCabe argues that Bishop counters modernist claims for an autonomous art object and an impersonal artist; Bishop's writing never represents an escape into perfected forms, but instead calls attention to the processes of language that construct identity. McCabe emphasizes how personal experience is deeply enmeshed with Bishop's poetics. Bishop's project returns to her early losses—the death of her father and her mother's madness—and uses them to disclose the instability of the concepts of self or place through a rhetoric of indeterminacy and uncertainty. Although Bishop has recently begun to receive the critical attention she deserves, this book uniquely brings loss to the foreground in connection with identity, gender, and the fashioning of a feminist poetics.

Susan McCabe juxtaposes the work of four American modernist poets with the techniques and themes of early twentieth-century European avant-garde films. The historical experience of World War One and its aftermath of broken and shocked bodies shaped a preoccupation with fragmentation in both film and literature. Film, montage and camera work provided poets with a vocabulary through which to explore and refashion modern physical and metaphoric categories of the body, including the hysteric, automaton, bisexual and femme fatale. This innovative study explores the impact of new cinematic modes of representation on the poetry of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H. D., and Marianne Moore. Cinematic Modernism links the study of literary forms with film studies, visual culture, gender studies and psychoanalysis to expand the usual parameters of literary modernism.

The Agha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry was inaugurated in 2003 to honor the late poet, a nationally recognized writer and a former professor at the University of Utah, and is sponsored by the University of Utah Press and the University of Utah Department of English. Descartes’ Nightmare is the 2007 prizewinning volume selected by this year’s judge, Cole Swenson, of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

I Woke a Lake faces the anxieties of climate change, extinctions, and political chaos. Susan McCabe weaves together the fragile fabric of worlds imagined and lost, both palpable and present. Poised between reveries and ruins, the book traverses several layers: the Ice Age; the excavation of the oldest female body; ancient Los Angeles before humans; and, in Sweden (McCabe's mother's home country), the 377-million-year-old meteor-made Siljan lake, in conversation with the oldest tree alive. These channeled non-human voices, both whimsical and uncanny, animate more recent landscapes--such as Dalarna's nearby seventeenth-century copper mine, now closed, along with a fantastical modern ice hotel in a state of meltdown. The landmarks of loss are sometimes dizzy-making as McCabe celebrates her childhood pantheism and queer development in West Hollywood, mourns dead relatives and lost habitats, and confronts her masculine lineage, blotted out through grief, addiction, and war. I Woke a Lake holds up an invisible telephone connecting recurrent locales, among them, blasted orchards, the Veterans' Cemetery, Elizabeth Bishop's childhood home in Great Village, grieving parties, and a cryopreservation site. These different layers reverberate with each other, taking on a haunted and haunting music, reaching toward an otherworldly, tender overhearing.

“Susan McCabe’s Swirl is a constantly provocative and often wildly inventive debut collection of poetry. Edgy and wise, sly and disarming, these poems are both cinemagraphic and kaliedescopic in their workings. Profoundly gestural and always powerful, Swirl introduces to American poetry a memorable and compelling new voice.” —David St. John “Every sentence in Susan McCabe’s gorgeous poems is a sounding. Her lines haunt the far side of memory—for “remembering is learning,” though of the most difficult kind; without its shadow side, “there is no presence.” Aswirl with the necessarily figurative conjurations of hidden, internal objects, Swirl mingles melancholy and metaphor to form a full-fledged yet emotionally bottomless reality. This poet doesn’t force anything: she is always already at the heart of imaginative fecundity, expanding, morphing like a “creature / drowning in blue whose limbs / loosen and pitch hooks.” She both searches the shadows with relentless honesty and joys in language. Her gift to the reader is immense.” —Calvin Bedient