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| B O O K S Winner of the Juniper Prize
“Like Penelope at the door of the millennium, and against all historical odds, Anna Rabinowitz confounds both traditional ideas of closure and postmodern glorification of release, in favor of the pilgrimage that all great writing undertakes.…an astonishing book…poem after poem testifies to the inevitable physical relationship between language and life.” —Denver Quarterly “…a dazzling, confident debut.” —Harvard Review “…formal invention, linguistic brilliance… blissful marriages of form and content.” —Chicago Tribune “…teem[s] with the specificity of daily life against a more blurry background of human longing and emotion.” —Publishers Weekly “…language at a height and experience at a depth that the whole art suddenly appears as a plinth on the plain of American letters.” —Molly Peacock “AT THE SITE OF INSIDE OUT splendidly enriches the site of American poetry.” —Ann Lauterbach “In her first collection, Rabinowitz proves herself an intelligent witness to grief, both her own and this century’s. She is drawn to forbidden spaces in living experience, language, and visual art, and devises novel means to enter them. For example, fascinated with the power of art to make “boundaries disappear,” Sappho lauds the achievement of Georgia O’Keeffe “making art with her body, / trapped in her body.” In “Anthem,” the reader is invited to “praise . . . the remains, the residues.” The speaker's most haunting visits are to Eastern Europe, where instead of finding an ancestral home, she experiences the historical past as a collage of atrocities: mouths of broken teeth, children skittering like mice. These “Dislocations” abandon punctuation to emphasize visceral imagery. Rabinowitz is just as unflinching in “Anatomy Lab” and “Fragile Dialectics,” where the body itself becomes opened to the merciless, clarifying light of her attention.” —Boston Review
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| © 2011 Anna Rabinowitz | ||||||||