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 PRESENT
TENSE
Omnidawn 2010
ISBN: 978-1-890650-45-2
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PRESENT TENSE is a tour de force, a book length
poetic project that functions as anatomy, history, testimony,
eulogy, and divining rod of our constantly evolving present
moment—exposing not only its various socio-religious-political
ecosystems but also the myriad echoes of those systems that resound
in our psyches and permeate our thoughts. Incorporating dialogue,
reportage, Biblical reference, interview, famous speech, infamous
cultural event and more, Rabinowitz offers to readers a deft account
of who and what we are as humans—in all of our darkness and our
brilliance. This poetry—with its invigorating breadth and shocking
immediacy—compels its readers’ full engagement with the page, an
interaction that incites us to examine our own position and
potential in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of the actual, as we
live it—moment by moment.
from
Huffington Post:
The 17 Most Important Poetry Books
of Fall 2010
Fall 2010 has been a great season for poetry. There are important
retrospectives of H. L. Hix's remarkable career and that of the
leading Arab poet, Adonis; new work by exciting young African
American poets Thomas Sayers Ellis and Major Jackson; politically
charged poetry by C. D. Wright and Anna Rabinowitz; late-career
flourishes by veterans Paul Muldoon and Charles Simic; engaging
experimental poetry by John Taggart and Julie Carr; and solidifying
entries by poets of international stature like Kamau Brathwaite and
Wislawa Szymborska. There's much to be excited about, and these
selections give a fair indication of the presses putting out the
most important poetry of the day and the degree of vitality of
various poetic styles.
Read More
from
Publishers Weekly:
The notes section in Rabinowitz's fourth
collection—a searing book-length poem in four parts—reveals the
great range of historic individuals and texts quoted and reworked:
among them, Woody Allen, Sun Tsu, Chief Seattle, the Book of
Proverbs, and declassified CIA counterintelligence interrogation
manuals. One poem imagines Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein in
dialogue on “the menace of war,” a central concern here. Rabinowitz
(The Wanton Sublime) candidly unloads her outrage and despair at
humanity's violent and destructive impulses, and throughout offers
an unbridled account of an apocalypse-in-the-now, replete with
“battalions of wound”; “Weepdirge and bleat of denuded trees”; and
“Blustery discord of harmonic debris.” Her imagery and argument,
bearing witness to “grizzly gunfire” and “mortgaged mayhem of
markets,” can at times feel heavy-handed and frenzied. But this
seems to be precisely her point—our times demand a raised voice.
“Testimony is a cryptic relic deformed by the violence of
authority,” writes Rabinowitz, who depicts a live-action struggle to
resist such deformation and to speak openly about the horrors of
contemporary life.
from
Tillalala
Chronicals:
“We live in interesting times. Economic collapse, environmental
catastrophe, climate change, endless war, and here in the U.S. an
attack on the middle class by a cabal of psychopathic plutocrats.
People are destitute, starved for something other than shopping
malls and slick choreography. People know, in their guts, that the
manner in which we inhabit this world is not working. Poetry, which
is now so marginalized in the U.S. that it barely functions as a
whisper in the ears of the fat cats in power, clutches at what
remains of spirit and subversive instinct.
Present Tense, the title of Anna Rabinowitz’s new collection of
poetry, presents a present tense of heaving geometries and “pellets
of time.” Time is, as it were, of essence. It is the laceration
behind the light of her language, the friction from which she
derives her heat. We are out of time, in time, on time, claimed by
time, wrestling with time, dreading time, shredding time, shedding
time, sparing and spearing and spending time.”
—John Olson
>
Read more
from
Guernica:
Present Tense shouldn't be
considered a collection of individual poems; it's a book-length
history of struggle.
Read More
from
Nouspique:
To the extent that we think about themes
in contemporary writing (assuming themes even exist outside high
school English classes) one of the most familiar themes to
trouble the contemporary reader’s brain is alienation. There is
social alienation reflected in accounts of loneliness and
atomisation. There is existential alienation reflected in
accounts of
absurdity
and loss of meaning. But we have given less thought to temporal
alienation. Maybe the reason for our neglect is that we are too
busy, caught up in the accelerating rush of faster processor
speeds and the neoliberal idolatry of market efficiencies which
betrays an “audacity with no time … to atone for our lives”. The
idea of pausing to think about something seems so yesterday.
In her latest volume of poetry, Present Tense, Anna
Rabinowitz faces squarely the matter of temporal alienation.
Even the title deserves our pause. At first glance, it looks
like a simple reference to simple grammar. We often write and
think and speak in present tense. It is the mode of everyday
commerce. But we readily see the double entendre, accentuated by
the fact that the cover’s text is distorted: the present is
tense. I interpret this (and the whole book for that matter) in
two ways, one personal, the other, political.
Personal: the present is tense. Unless we have
some cognitive deficit or psychosis, we do our living in present
time, and that fact alone bears within it the seeds of dread.
This dread is the lingering trauma of consciousness, “reality as
a triumph of open wounds.” But I would contend that it is a
violence inflicted on us not, as some experts claim, in the
moment of childbirth, but in the subsequent gift of language; it
is in the acquisition of language that we discover ourselves as
subjects alienated from the world we inhabit. Every time we
read, it’s like picking at a scab. We relive the violence of
that first alienating trauma when we discovered how words impose
a distance between us and our world.
Political: the present is tense. The present
age is dominated by feelings of dread. We fear difference,
change, infectious diseases, same-sex marriage, government,
violent crime, atheists, earthquakes, terrorists, tsunamis,
climate change, asteroids, drug cartels, pesticides, TNC’s,
GMO’s, NGO’s, Somali pirates, copyright pirates, bottled water.
In the political context, we experience the anxiety of temporal
alienation as a collective forgetfulness. We deny our history,
or we remember only the convenient bits. That allows us to live
like there’s no tomorrow, consuming, invading, dominating,
destroying. - David A. Barker
Read More
from
QUINTESSENCE:
I have recently been reading Anna
Rabinowitz' book-length poem, PRESENT TENSE (Omnidawn
Publishing, 2010). This stunning work of lucid but uncomfortable
insight, and her use of powerful, transforming imagery and
language, has resonated in my subconsciousness for days. What
does it mean to possess a soul, to be biological, to invent time
- primarily to establish purpose - and with this new and sterile
construct of history, devolve to violence? Barbarism lurks
beneath a thin veneer of civilization. War, that which we invent
from a cold core of primal fear; lost in our alienation, lost as
self-defined beings. Can we ever erase the seeds of
self-destruction once sown? Where, Rabinowitz asks in her review
of the scroll of history, does love dwelleth? - Glenda Burgesss.
Read More
from
New Pages:
Present Tense, by Anna
Rabinowitz, phases through genres, using poetry as a vehicle to
explore politics, gender, culture and human nature. The book
opens with a prologue, a single sentence that declares the
purpose of the book and the long list of who the book is for:
This writing is for the ones who inhabit
elsewhere and for
those faces that appear on my inner lids as they close, for
me with Richie on the tricycle navigating fenced shrubs
and cement pathways between blades of grass, for Mr.
Bernstein’s laundry store redolent of boiled starch, for
umbrellas on the beach, waves whacking and wildering,
for lying perfectly still while heat runnels through groins,
underarms, neck, for the children, good morning, freshing,
sparkly day, give me a hug, for my mother who could not
stay, for my father who didn’t want to, for those denied
choice, for hate that stains the playing fields of men…
The lengthy credo helps the reader to
anticipate the range in the writing that follows, and to expect
the all-encompassing aspect of the poetry. The stretch of the
book can be overwhelming at times, feeling as if it is lacking
focus, but this is perhaps purposeful, mimicking the chaos of
modern day living. - Renee Emerson.
Read More
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