Radio Crackling, Radio Gone

by Lisa Olstein

Overview

Winner of the Hayden Carruth Award Radio Crackling, Radio Gone is a debut collection of poetry that explores multiple logics of perception, association, and interpretation. Navigating the edges where things begin to disappear, the poems inhabit border zones of transformation where memory slides into imagination, wakefulness meets sleep, and things possessed become lost. 

What seemed a mystery was
in fact a choice. Insert bird for sorrow.
What seemed a memory was in fact
a dividing line. Insert bird for wind.
Insert wind for departure when everyone
is standing still. . .

Radio Crackling, Radio Gone was selected from the 1,200 submissions to the Hayden Carruth Award. By the time the anonymous manuscript was chosen as winner, the cover sheet was filled with readers' commentary: "stunning" and "lovely" and a bold "YES!"

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781619320536
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	12/11/2012
Series:	Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	90
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Lisa Olstein was born in 1972 and raised near Boston, Massachusetts. She earned a BA from Barnard and a MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, undertaking additional studies at Harvard Divinity School. Her debut volume, Radio Crackling, Radio Gone, won the prestigious Hayden Carruth Award. She currently directs the Juniper Initiative for Literary Arts&Action in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Editorial Reviews

The poems in Olstein's Hayden Carruth Award-winning debut inhabit haunted interiors where "[g]arage doors open and close of their own volition," and landscapes where "everything blooms coldly" and "the sun shines through like a moon." Olstein constructs an almost impersonal, dreamlike atmosphere tinged with malaise, inertia and a sense that anything could happen but very little does. She is drawn to fluidity (references to water abound) and transitional states (from sleep to waking, from day to night); she is devoted to paradox, wonder and uncertainty. Such interests are nothing if not lyrical commonplaces, but Olstein's doggedness and focus lend them, here and there, a fresh vitality: "We huddle for warmth as if in a cave made of snow." The poems sometimes threaten to dissolve into a cloud of their own devising ("I'd never seen it so clear,// so gusty, so overcast, so clear, so calm"), but Olstein reins in her haziness with studiously regulated line lengths and stanza shapes. She is at her best and certainly most distinctive punctuating the book's cultivated vagueness with a blast of vivid, arresting detail: "April's first bee stumbles newly minted from its vault." (Nov.) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

For the sake of clarity, "Language Crackling, Language Gone" might better serve as the title for this impressive debut collection. The poems are marked by a guiding intelligence that, in turn, shows itself as both elegiac and playful. The worlds of horse barns and wings balance comfortably with garage doors and breakups as the syntax runs circles around the reader, fragments, and finally comes back together with a reexamination of, or revelation of, the self. The tug of war between a modern and a postmodern aesthetic is most evident in such work as "Metaphor Will Get You Everywhere" and "Down to the Finest Particle of Every Falling Strand." At times, the poems are sparse to the point of emptiness, with many phrases falling back on themselves, as in "Once I was very brave. I was very brave once," creating an overall impression of a child's game where once the goal is mastered, the players move on to other entertainments. Yet when Olstein puts magic tricks away, the silky purr of the radio remains-consoling and genuinely mysterious. This poet brings a sparkling consciousness to the page and an exciting new voice to American poetry.-Susan Rich, Highline Community Coll., Des Moines, WA Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal