peep

peep

by Danielle Blau
peep

peep

by Danielle Blau

Paperback

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Overview

Danielle Blau's Hecht Prize winning debut collection, PEEP invites you into a world so strange it is utterly familiar, a world from our ancient past that could also be the future—or a twisted version of the present. It is a mirror world where the husk of our culture shows starkly, and yet it is lit by joy, in the words, the verses themselves. PEEP is uncanny, primal, magical, capturing hopelessness, gridlock, our impact on the environment and those around us, questioning progress and the language we use to speak to each other, each little peep a little life desperate to not pass unnoticed.

"The first impressions Danielle Blau's poems give the reader are impressions of newness and immediacy. These impressions also happen to be, along with the many others that billow out of these rich and abundant poems, the second and fifth (and fiftieth) impressions. Blau's newness and immediacy aren't ephemeral or fugitive. They aren't calculated or contrived. And they aren't generated from fashionable detailing or cultural signalling. Her poems glitter, and they're incredibly energetic, but they're never flashy, and their persuasiveness derives from deep sources. Though her flexible diction is present-day, though she has a gender-specific savviness and élan that probably wouldn't have been possible before the advent of the twenty-first century (or thereabouts), though she's street-wise, nothing in her work is just contemporary, nothing is independent of anything else. As hip as she is, she's also a throwback to the Romantic vocation of organic form. All her effects are emanations of the fullness with which her sensibility inhabits language and the confident way her imagination takes possession of her experience ... peep is a tour de force, and it's more than a tour de force. It displays deep within itself, for all its intellectual and imaginative power and self-delight, a curious tenderness and vulnerability. The book glories in language and thinking; it's imaginative and bold; but it's also intimate. If I were asked to account for this intimacy, especially in the face of all the other effects that Blau realizes, I might say, diffidently, that Blau is the performer of her own experience, but she is also its scholar and critic."—Vijay Seshadri

Poetry.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781911379034
Publisher: The Waywiser Press
Publication date: 04/27/2022
Pages: 112
Product dimensions: 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Danielle Blau's Rhyme or Reason: Poets, Philosophers, and the Problem of Being Here Now is forthcoming from W. W. Norton. Her collection mere eye (Poetry Society of America, 2013) was selected for a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Award and published with an introduction by D. A. Powell, and her poems won first place in the multi-genre Narrative 30 Below Contest. Poetry, short stories, articles, and interviews by Blau appear in The Atlantic, Australian Book Review, The Baffler, The Literary Review, Narrative Magazine, The New Yorker's book blog, The Paris Review, Ploughshares, The Saint Ann's Review, several volumes of the Plume Anthology of Poetry, and elsewhere. Her work has been set to music by composers of various stripes and performed in such venues as Museum of Contemporary Art Australia and Carnegie Hall. A graduate of Brown University with an honors degree in philosophy, and of New York University with an MFA in poetry, she curates and hosts the monthly Gavagai Music + Reading Series in Brooklyn, teaches at Hunter College in Manhattan, and lives with her son Kai in Queens.

Table of Contents

Foreword Vijay Seshadri xi

The Vernal Equinox Story 3

I

The Fear 7

A Suicide Bomber (Eighteen Seconds to Go) Foresees Her Death 18

The Insider 19

The gap between 20

II

Ostinato 25

Full Rhymes to Live (More Fully) By 26

Inventory 31

Creation Myth 32

Whose Hands 33

The Spare Room 34

Villanelle 37

Hapax Legomenon 38

We're Human, All of Us Girls, and We're Young 42

Some Views f/ Thingèd Surface 44

Magus 46

No News Today 49

Nth Sunday in Ordinary Time 50

(Blessed Are) They Who Preserve 51

III

Family Thanksgiving on Brimstone Island, Maine 57

Formal Proof That the Universe Is Neither Cruel nor Kind, and That This Is the Greatest Conceivable Horror 58

5 Revelation Loop Apt 5L 60

How Long Now Since the Mailman's Gone Missing? 62

Ileocecal 63

I Am the Perennial Head of This One-person Subcutaneous Wrecking Crew 64

Conversations with Death 65

In the Valley of the Choice Vine II: The Wax Museum 71

Penance 72

Arpeggio Progression in Missing Key 73

A Note About the Author 83

A Note About the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize 85

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