Uncertain Grace

by Rebecca Wee

Overview

Winner of the Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781556591549
Publisher:	Copper Canyon Press
Publication date:	05/01/2001
Series:	Hayden Carruth Award for New and Emerging Poets
Edition description:	1 ED
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Rebecca Wee is a professor of creative writing at Augustana College, Illinois. She received her MFA from George Mason University, and has received several awards for her poetry. She has served as the editor for the minnesota review and editorial assistant to Carolyn Forche on her 1993 anthology Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.

Read an Excerpt

Pont des Arts

She's bent in a posture of anguish or prayer
in a spot of city filth.

Head down, a stained knit cap
with a few coins on the ground beside her,
and her pliant child, a shadow.

Someone veers past with a friend
in a clamor of rings and scarves. A pretty child
skips after them, scattering pigeons.

The mothers miss how their daughters' eyes catch them--
the wary, openmouthed stares.

A terrible knowledge passes between them,
the bridge rippling under their feet,

before the polished child rushes past but looks back
at the one on the bridge in the heat--

the sunblown silent one
whose hand has pulled back and flown up to smooth,
for a moment, her heavy hair.

Editorial Reviews

While often enacting inner dialogues for straw men like "intellectualism," "empiricism," "estheticism" and "humanism," Rebecca Wee's debut, Uncertain Grace, is often more concerned with how arguments get pieced together and what the emotional consequences of forms can be than with their actual terms. "Intarsia," whose title is a type of Italian mosaic, collages images from around the world, including Rome, Jerusalem and Thailand, ending with an image of a beggar wearing a shirt of lace that "sparkles where it's held together with bits of wire, tiny pins." Another montage poem, "Graffiti Under Memorial Bridge" combines slivers of narrative and conversations as means to meditate on the relationship between actions and results. While there is some humor, particularly in the poems "A Few Words on Penis Envy" and "A Conversation," the tone here is fairly rarefied, with dramatic sentence fragments gesturing toward the unsayable. ( May 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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