The Nine Senses

by Melissa Kwasny

Overview

The prize-winning author of Thistle shares “a quietly magnificent collection of prose poems” that explore how we connect to the world around us (Orion).

Drawing inspiration from the work of Rene Char, Melissa Kwasny presents a new kind of prose poem in The Nine Senses. These experiments challenge the way we read sequentially, making each line equal to the next as disparate figures and topics appear side by side: Dylan Thomas, Roman water lines, Paul Celan, Shirin Neshat, anti-depressants, Buddhism, William Carlos Williams, Trakl, cancer, Beckett, Pound, Breton, the Iraq War, telekinesis, clairvoyance, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, and Yeats, among many others.

Through it all, Kwasny asks how we tie ourselves to the world when our minds are always someplace other than where we are? As bromides and aphorisms degrade, we are left with startling new realizations. Obliquely touching on the cancer of a friend, her own troubled relationship with her father, and the break-up of a nearly thirty-year partnership, Kwasny also questions mortality, temporality, and eternity. Kwasny then abandons abstraction with some very direct poems about her own cancer and diagnosis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781571318329
Publisher:	Milkweed Editions
Publication date:	10/05/2021
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	114
File size:	467 KB

About the Author

Melissa Kwasny is the author of Reading Novalis in Montana (Milkweed Editions, 2009), The Archival Birds (Bear Star Press, 2000) and Thistle (Lost Horse Press, 2006), which won the Idaho Prize in 2006. She is also the editor of Toward the Open Field: Poets on the Art of Poetry 1800-1950 (Wesleyan University Press, 2004). Widely published in journals, including Willow Springs, Threepenny Review, Ploughshares, Poetry Northwest, Bellingham Review, Crab Orchard Review, and River Styx, she was recently the Richard Hugo Visiting Poet at the University of Montana and a Visiting Writer at the University of Wyoming. She wrote many of the poems in The Nine Senses during a residency at the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in Jefferson City, Montana.

Editorial Reviews

“Melissa Kwasny’s work serves as a brilliant tonic, reminding us of the essential gravitas of poems of distinction. Hers present a richly textured surface and a deeply thought interior, and have a compass that deftly mingles the scholarly page with beauticians’ hopes and tobacco pouches; a naturalist’s tight focus with the wide gaze of a woman of the world; a lyricist’s gifts with a philosopher’s understandings. This is the real-deal stuff.”—Albert Goldbarth, author of The Kitchen Sink, on Reading Novalis in Montana

“In The Nine Senses, Melissa Kwasny follows the path of amor mundi beyond the ‘senses five,’ never parting the real from the dreamt, the dead from the living, the lost from the loved, the solitary from the communal. In a book of prose poems, she makes her turns internally. As with my favorite words, rooms, faces, and flowers, I feel that light is sewn up into them. Between their lines moves an ethics of embodied becoming, like the tree, ‘whole and shining,’ she gives us in the spaces of venetian blinds. ‘The dawns are numbered, as I am,’ she writes. But in the joint counting houses of morphology and phenomenology, each hour could take a lifetime to know. Inside the devastation and the beauty, we sit with the question: will we seek salvation from the world, or a radicalized (re) attachment to it. ‘Nay, too late for cost-counting’ says the hell-bound speaker in Christina Rossetti¹s ‘Amor Mundi’ ‘This downhill path is easy, but there¹s no turning back.’ Today more than ever we must ask ourselves which is the real hell: amor mundi or contemptus mundi. Turn away no more, says Blake. Kwasny has written us a book of charms, in the old sense. A book to bind us to the world, and to each other.”—Sarah Gridley

From the Publisher