A Woman of Property

by Robyn Schiff

Overview

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize

A new book from a poet whose work is "wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive" (Jorie Graham)

Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780698407343
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/29/2016
Series:	Penguin Poets
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	782 KB

About the Author

Robyn Schiff is the author of Revolver and Worth (both published by the University of Iowa Press), and the chapbook Novel Influenza (The Catenary Press). Schiff's poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Boston Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Schiff is a co-editor at Canarium Books and she teaches poetry at the University of Iowa.

Editorial Reviews

Robyn Schiff is a worrier. The intricate poems in her third book, A Woman of Property, roam mental spaces defined by her far-flung anxieties…Yet constant worry gives rise to constant pleasure in these fidgety, hyperintelligent poems. They swivel and leap from topic to topic, delighting in uncommon facts and far-fetched analogies.

The New York Times Book Review - Stephen Burt

★ 02/15/2016
Few collections this year are likely to match the subtle intelligence in this third outing from Schiff (Revolver), whose syllabic stanzas, intricate syntax, and polymathic repertoire owes more than a bit to Marianne Moore. A few of its 16 poems are brief, but most stretch their legs, as well as their subject matter to include viral contagion, suburban homemaking, tornado sirens, minor court disputes, Greek tragedy, fairy tales, cave art, and the anxieties of new motherhood: “Guests/ come and go and// I rest my rest on the baby’s head, which/ has an opening, and/ consider Justice.” Infant vulnerability, for Schiff, recalls the vulnerability of Americans—to each other, to external threats, to disease, to breakdowns in infrastructure or civic trust. But as political as Schiff gets, she is more often inward looking, trying to understand her own fears and dependencies: “The temptations of self-sufficiency/ are great, but not great/ enough,” she writes in a poem about pregnancy that is also a poem about lobsters in restaurant tanks. Extraordinarily long sentences can be hard to decode, but none are impenetrable, and most introduce punchier follow-throughs. Schiff’s first books took material from songbird biology, jewelry design, and gun manufacture: this one pulls material from anywhere and everywhere, and she fashions it into her sharpest lines yet. (Apr.)

Publishers Weekly

Praise for Robyn Schiff and A Woman of Property

“A study of the imagination’s darker powers and their daily, domestic insurrections. . .Schiff’s poems, with their Hitchcock-like distrust of appearances, their alertness to hidden binds and snares, offer something few poets ever discover:  a vision of the whole world. . . these poems are interested in everything, possessing a capaciousness that, paradoxically, requires tight control.”
–Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker

“Schiff’s poems circle worlds of worry in arriving at uncommon connections. . .they swivel and leap from topic to topic, delighting in uncommon facts and far-fetched analogies.”
–Stephen Burt, The New York Times Book Review

“Schiff’s is a major species of weird, glowing genius. She finds cosmic flow in the most awkward corners and masterminds whole new dimensions in the realms of wit, worry, and ‘what if?’ I don’t know what kind of magic allows this poet to take apart the entire world . . . and reassemble it with more pleasure, depth, loveliness, deadpan wordsmithery and good hard intelligence than it ever had before. I see everything differently now that I’ve experienced this world.  Nobody writes like Robyn Schiff: her brilliance is singular, her vision compound. We’ll be measuring this work’s radiance in light-years.”
–Brenda Shaughnessy

“This brilliant revelation of having and being had winds like a spiral staircase down from the nursery, into the garden, through violence and lust and contagion, to the Greek tragedy that is the foundation on which our American tragedy is built. ‘Every time I descend the stairs,’ Schiff writes, ‘I trespass what I already own.’”
–Eula Biss, author of On Immunity: An Inoculation

“Few collections this year are likely to match the subtle intelligence in this third outing from Schiff, whose syllabic stanzas, intricate syntax, and polymathic repertoire owes more than a bit to Marianne Moore. . .her sharpest lines yet.” '
–Publishers Weekly (starred review)

From the Publisher