The Do-Over

by Kathleen Ossip

Overview

A much anticipated third collection with poems mourning a mother figure, as well as recently deceased cultural icons.

Praise for Kathleen Ossip:

“Ossip conjures delightful and unexpected muses…shrewd and ambitious.”
—New York Times Book Review

"The Do-Over, Ossip’s third collection, is a lyrical, open-ended, meta-leaning meditation on the subject of death….[A]n exquisite cocktail of displacement, minutiae, and metapoetic introspection."
—Boston Review

“The biggest surprise in poetry for 2011 is this second book by Kathleen Ossip. It’s got everything one could wish for in a new collection of poems. . . . It’s just beautiful. And terrifying.”
—Publishers Weekly, Best Books of 2011

“The poet has an uncanny ability to convey what it actually feels like to be alive today…Ossip is one of our foremost ethnographers of contemporary unreality.”
—The Believer

“How do you stay in heaven?” Ossip asks, “Is it a kind of sophisticated rewind?” Her third collection of poems is haunted by the idea of ‘rewind,’ and especially by the teasing possibility that we, too–like the moon, like a plant–may be granted cycles of life, death, and rebirth. The book's overarching narrative is the death of the poet’s stepmother-in-law, a cherished, loving, eccentric woman who returns to its pages again and again. But in spite of its focused grief and ontological urgency, The Do-Over is a varied collection–short acrostics mourn recently dead cultural icons (Amy Winehouse, Steve Jobs, Donna Summer); there's an ode to an anonymous Chinese factory worker, three “true stories” that read like anecdotes told over drinks, and more. The Do-Over is an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure, a fragmented portrait of its difficult, much loved subject. It's also a snapshot of our death-obsessed, death-denying cultural moment, which in Ossip's gifted hands turns out to be tremulous, skeptical, unsure of ultimate values and, increasingly, driven to find them. “I am still studying, aren’t you?” she begins. Readers will eagerly embrace the surprise, humor, and seriousness of her quest.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781936747962
Publisher:	Sarabande Books
Publication date:	02/03/2015
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.30(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Cold War (one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2011), The Search Engine (selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize), and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Washington Post, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School in New York and online for The Poetry School of London. She was a founding editor of LIT and is the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Table of Contents

1

A. in May / 8
Mothers Day / 9
“I’m afraid of death” / 10
Ode / 11
The Road Trip and the Apron String / 15
Lyric / 16

2

Ghost Moon / 28
How can we know the journey from the path? / 29
On Political Crisis / 31
The Great Man is dead, / 32
It’s hard to keep identities / 33
Veterans Day / 34
Amy Winehouse / 35
Steve Jobs / 36
Troy Davis / 37
Lucian Freud, / 38
Donna Summer / 39
Three True Stories / 40
The Millipede / 41

3

A. in January / 44
What is A. / 45
What is Death / 46
Sonnet for A. / 53
Libraries & Museums / 54

4

“No use” / 56
Three Short Lyrics / 58
After / 59

5

On Sadness / 73
The Do-Over / 74
Tool Moan / 75
Words for a Newborn / 76
The Arrival of Spring / 78
Funeral of My Character / 81
One Short Lyric / 82
Oh, wow, mausoleums, / 83

Editorial Reviews

Ossip writes to remember the dead, especially Andrea Ossip (1944-2008), her husband's stepmother; to face her own death without panic, if she can; to help us face ours; and to show how an aggressively up-to-date vocabulary—one that would make a lesser writer sound jaded, or bored, or distracted by pings from her iPhone—can fit the most serious of poetic concerns…When The Do-Over works…it gives us traditional mourning and glib modern language simultaneously, then lets the dissonance jangle and ring.

The New York Times Book Review - Stephen Burt

02/02/2015
At the core of this third collection from Ossip (The Cold War) is a desire to perform elegy—to speak of and to the dead—and, in the process, to imbue a new luster to the world of the living. "The songs are all a pleasure," she writes, "and one day// we won't have the pleasure of breathing." There is a masterful control at play, a firm lyric that returns to the theme of death without suffocating or trivializing it; it's a voice that can be intimate and quiet as well as urgent. This two-fold approach is encapsulated neatly in her line: "But silence has a way of making you want to fill it." That crux—the need to perform elegy despite the fact that it will not and cannot literally bring back the dead—is the engine of the collection; the inability of the poet to remain silent while staring into silence. These tendencies are pushed further by the extent to which contemplating mortality becomes a self-reflexive and romanticizing process. In a gesture towards themes of re-birth, Ossip admits that "Of course we are/ endlessly/ fascinating to ourselves." But Ossip is neither selfish nor self-serving, rather she understands well how "Love triumphs/ over brutality// because brutality/ must end/ with death, and love// never does." (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Working in acrostics, chain verse, prose, couplets, quatrains, Ossip's a magpie who pilfers from magpies....[S]he has an eye for 'the light of the culture: gold and misleading' and an ear that saves her wisdom moments from bluntness: 'I see the forest, I see the trees. / What I can't see is the / dappled clearing I'm standing on.' And then she devastates you by removing a single letter from a common poetic word: 'In the clearing, the now is falling.'"
—The Chicago Tribune

"It may be the case that Ossip understands the elasticity and capaciousness of contemporary poetry better than anybody. . . . This is our book."
—NPR

"In as much as it makes sense to talk about writing as perfect, The Do-Over is not, nor does it mean to be. But it is remarkable: unusually alive, intelligent and alert; unusually imaginative in its ways of letting the now fall into poems that find more invitations in impermanence than any others I’ve read recently."
—Slate

"This supremely protean, dexterous poet focuses her reader’s attention on the hinges between the physical and metaphysical, on the reinvention of narrative and metaphor.... Ossip suggests that we let grief enliven us, shake up our language, darken our metaphors, and tear us awake."
—Harvard Review

“Unassuming and masterfully crafted, Ossip’s poetry is sneaky, very often disguising itself as easy and surprising you the moment you let your guard down. . . . The Do-Over is a kind of elegy to contemporary culture: it critiques modern life while basking in its ever-younger, glitzier rabble."
—The Paris Review

"Each of Ossip’s acrostics shows her to be a master of compression, whereas the longer, serial prose-verse poems demonstrate her ability to build longer structures without sacrificing density of language.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

From the Publisher

01/01/2015
In her third full collection (after The Cold War), Ossip presents poems that explore celebrity, mourn a loved one who has died (the mysterious A.), and share vignettes of daily life. The poet employs many modernistic and postmodernistic techniques: the use of white space, varying line and font sizes, repetition, capitalization, and freestanding punctuation marks. That said, several of the poems have a traditional stanza format, a few are prose poems, and one is not a poem at all but a short story. Ossip's strengths include humor, a distinct way of looking at the world, and a fearless approach to the famous: in "The Road Trip and the Apron String" she says, "A spurt of attention yields up/ me and Keats, iris to iris." At times, her phrasing veers toward slogans or makes little sense: "Perseverance is beautiful, and embarrassing./ How many institutions of power remain?/ Several. Several…." Too many metaphors either fall flat or seem so unconnected as to interrupt the flow of the poem, as in the long piece "What Is Death": "Morphine is the prototype narcotic drug and is the standard against which all other/ opiates are tested/ like a mother's arms." And in the poem, "Words to a Newborn," the poet advises, "You'll learn many procedures/ for mastering everyday life. You'll learn/ to think like a computer and like a plant." VERDICT On the whole, this is a disappointing collection. The poems lack music, and the language often diverges into prose except for the infrequent occasion when Ossip makes the experience being described new: "I sit/ with hands folded, by a pond, a pool, wimpled by unknowing."—Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

Library Journal