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> The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders
> Darkling: A Poem
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THE WANTON SUBLIME: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders
Tupelo Press 2006
ISBN: 1-932195-39-4,  978-1-932195-39-2
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> Buy The Wanton Sublime from your local bookseller, Amazon.com, or Tupelo Press

PRAISE FOR THE WANTON SUBLIME

from Publishers Weekly:

The editor of American Letters and Commentary, Rabinowitz investigates the mysteries, myths and cultural accretions around the Virgin Mary in this third collection; Mary becomes, in these rapt and provocative poems, both a symbol of ecstatic transcendence and a focus for questions about gender and power. Drawing eclectically on forms from rhyming quatrains to e. e. cummingsesque typography, Rabinowitz re-imagines the Annunciation as a "Manysplendoredmoonmottledmarvel of the metaphysical," presenting a Virgin "entrapped/ and captive," "disarmed/ by angels/ a heart unarmed/ in evernow," insisting in dramatic capitals that angelic "LIGHT NEED NOT BE EXPLAINED." She places Mary in a tradition of mystics from Pythagoras and Greek myths to Catholic saints, leavening her paeans and chants with references to skeptics such as Michel de Montaigne. Rabinowitz's technique can be extravagant, but it may be the only way to do justice to the extreme emotions and ambitions she describes: "And with her YES a future world takes shape."  Read More

Read more about THE WANTON SUBLIME on Publishers Weekly Religion Bookline 


from Booklist:

Following her acclaimed book-length poem, Darkling (2001), this innovative examination of the Annunciation uses a collagelike, fractured narrative to explore the complex possibilities within the sacred story. Florilegium refers to "a collection of excerpts from written texts" and, in Latin, relates to flower gathering. The poems do form a "bouquet," plucked from varying sources of truths, lies, and artistic inquisition. Rabinowitz is a highly intellectual poet with unique vision and a distinct voice. She knows the rules of poetry and breaks them beautifully, bending words and forms to her purpose. Some poems seem a tad gimmicky as they follow linguistic/mental association, but others succeed in lending a lightheartedness that demonstrates that Rabinowitz does not take herself too seriously. This does not, however, lessen her respect for her subject matter, or for her role as translator of thought or "vessel through which the music passes" (as Stravinsky called himself). Some readers will find Rabinowitz challenging, but all will be sent on a journey into fresh poetic and philosophical territory.   
—Janet St. John

from Library Journal:

Often using a series of responses, reflections, and interpretations to ancient florilegium (a collection of excerpts), Rabinowitz (Darkling) writes about the Annunciation and Mary, who says, "Though I be mute, unseen, do not be ignorant of me." The author uses text as scaffolding, creating a field of words that seems to occupy and rise above the page, a meditative texture that is ironic and transcendent. Rabinowitz also contracts with multiple choices and voices to explore the human issues, which envelop the Annunciation, and the LIGHT [that] CANNOT BE EXPLAINED. The question of Mary's being game or tool seems central to her poetic arguments. Rabinowitz portrays Mary as both maiden who submits (reluctantly? willingly?) and mother who truly anguishes over the loss of her child ("She is and remains a mother/ even though her child die") and his eventual denunciation of her. As in her previous book, Darkling, Rabinowitz seems to inscribe the past to interpret and honor it: "For the child she will have boundless love/ For posterity the memory of being/ For her life no proper translation." Recommended for contemporary poetry collections.
—Karla Huston

from Jacket Magazine

Something is afoot in poetry. Joining the ranks of collections of largely self-possessed, discrete poems are poetic sagas, story-long volumes that signal not only a rebirth and reinterpretation of the ballad but lay challenge to the more traditional literary forms assumed to rule over narrative, be they fictions short and long, historical accounts, or philosophical treatises. ...These new books have long legs and curiously complex nervous systems, sending feedback loops forward and backward through the collection. For the reader, the effect is somewhat akin to moving through a thicket of voices reprising and clarifying previous conversations even as they amend and add to them.

Though we have a handful of contemporary poets, as well as not so contemporary influences, to thank for this new wave in poetry's ocean, we can glean much about the movement, if it be one, through a singe poet and her third and latest collection of verse: Anna Rabinowitz and The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders.  Read more

from How2

In The Poet, Emerson writes that "the history of hierarchies seems to show that all relisious error consisted in making the symbol too stark and solid, and was at last nothing but an excess of the organ of language." In her most recent book of poetry, The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders, Anna Rabinowitz makes physically present the Annunciation, the moment at which Mary was told she would bear Christ. The "stark and solid" representation of Mary is undone in the gesture towards making physical both Mary as a person and the act through which she conceived Christ. In doing so, Rabinowitz creates a tension between mysticism and physicality, proposing a possible amalgam of the two, where Mary can be both divine and real, metaphor and actuality, transcendent and corporeal.   Read more 

from Blogcritics.org

In her third volume of poetry, The Wanton Sublime, Anna Rabinowitz creates an extended meditation upon the Annunciation — the moment that starts everything in traditional Christian believing — the moment the angel Gabriel appears to a young Mary and tells her she's going to be the mother of God. As a Protestant male, I may not be best positioned to review such poetry. More so given that I belong to a denomination which is comfortable ordaining openly gay clergy. In the faith community I frequent concerns about the Annunciation have been tossed into a dusty remainder bin, and its controversies passed long ago. Why should I care what women are saying now about the Annunciation?
Read more

from The Catholic Register of Canada

“To those who have a firm view of Mary's role in salvation history, some of the poems' stark imagery may appear to push the boundaries, but to those who want to probe deeper into their faith, The Wanton Sublime poses challenges that may even strengthen their belief.”
-Patria Rivera

from NewPages

The elliptical subtitle of Anna Rabinowitz's The Wanton Sublime says as much about the forthcoming poems as any explanation can: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders. In the Catholic Church, Florilegia are collections of patristic writings excerpted and compiled to serve either dogmatic or ethical purposes, but here Rabinowitz appropriates the form to serve her own poetic and metaphysical purposes. That is, she challenges the dominant patristic (read masculinist) vision of femininity, exploring the untold “whethers and wonders” of gender in the historical imagination of western culture. Rabinowitz begins her exploration in the image of Mary's face from Michelangelo's Pietà, appearing in extreme close-up, blurred, and earth-toned on the book's cover. Similarly, the poet herself blurs the idea of youthful feminine chastity that the Virgin Mother has always represented. Read more


Anna Rabinowitz’s riveting linguistic experiment is at once a celebration of and a quest for an understanding of what we have come to accept as “the eternal feminine.” Timely and important, The Wanton Sublime is a must-read.
—Claudia Rankine

Anna Rabinowitz has made a voice out of all the sounds surrounding her. As she says: "That which installs itself in the mind embraces sound / Rebounding, / rounding the fecund earth." There is such passionate love of the found earth, in spite of the pain it causes, in Rabinowitz's poems that hers is now one of our most necessary voices.
—Bin Ramke

“Cast thine gaze upon me,” a mother beseeches her son and, in this entreaty, Anna Rabinowitz refracts the narrative of the Annunciation. The Wanton Sublime links the gaze of Mary with the gaze of the viewer with the gaze of the reader and the gaze of archangel/Muse/perp/lover, asserting that there is a 'known thing' between object and sign, a link between essential experience and what we fashion from it. The Wanton Sublime is a generous, inspired book by a poet of clear intelligence and bounteous gifts.
—Susan Wheeler
 

Darkling: A Poem
Tupelo Press, 2001
$14.95 paper, ISBN 0-9710310-4-5

> Buy Darkling from your local bookseller, Amazon.com, or Tupelo Press

DARKLING was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Award for Best Poetry Book of 2001.

DARKLING is a book-length sequence of elegiac fragments, obsessive ruminations on the lives of the poet's Polish-Jewish parents, grandparents, as well as her own, filtered through the eyes of an extraordinarily clear-eyed contemporary witness. It would be easy to sentimentalize the events portrayed — the childhood memory, for example, of nearly losing one's little brother because of one's own carelessness — but Rabinowitz's technical brilliance, allusive texture, verbal and rhythmic precision, and especially her self-irony give these lyrics their razor edge, their air of hard-earned authenticity. This is a deeply moving book.
—Marjorie Perloff    

Excerpts from reviews of Darkling

“…[a] daring book-length masterpiece…” —Sharon Dolin in Jacket Magazine
> Read more

“Rabinowitz muses on displacement and the fracturing of language and self, and mass murder and the guilt and grief of the living, in a piercing and powerful incantation”…“[an] elegantly structured and timely poem of loss and remembrance”—Booklist

“This dense, unsettling volume makes a unique contribution to Holocaust literature.” —Publishers Weekly

“Charles Reznikoff's long impersonal poem Holocaust and the very personal DARKLING are the ineradicable Twin Towers of Holocaust poetry in English.” —Frigate
> Read more

“…not a book of poems, nor even a single long poem, but a single poetic gesture, a linguistic act…” “ …an extraordinarily intense experiment in language and the emotional freighting of …lives” —Bin Ramke in Boston Review

“Darkling borrows from narrative in its implicit drama and occasional dialogue, but it is in no way a chronicle or family album. It has more in common with the two columns of light that penetrated the night over Manhattan in memoriam to the World Trade Towers. It is a monument, yes, but a very imponderable and disembodied one. If you’re ‘stalking the unpossessable,/ entreating the impalpable,’ Rabinowitz states, you need phantoms and metaphors, not a photo album. You need words with a powerful vertical dimension, ‘half-tones in half-dark,’…‘tentative gropings for kernels of was…’ It’s that kind of book: sad, wistful, ghostly, and haunted, and its streets [are] ‘teeming with emptiness.’ It is also, defiantly, a profoundly hopeful book. Anything this lovingly and carefully constructed—foraged out of Nothingness—cannot help but amend, in some way, the lives it unravels.” —John Olson in American Book Review, September-October 2002. (This is an excerpt from a critical review of DARKLING by John Olson.)
> Read John Olson’s introduction, “Poetry on the Edge.”

“[DARKLING] mesmerizes, flies through your fingers like bits of time you want to hold onto…each segment takes on its own poetic form, lending the whole a music that shifts and changes, speeds and slows.” —Las Vegas Mercury

“It would be faint exaggeration to say that DARKLING is the most innovative poem of the year …” “…daring, original and beautifully designed, [DARKLING] sprawls across the page with a feral energy. It alternately cries from the depths of human suffering and soars to the heights of imagination...[DARKLING] aims heavenward…a song of the spirit, plaintive and strong, rising on wings of prayer.” —Wichita Eagle

“Reading this acrostic sequence is a challenge, but…the power and vision of history and of personal redemption rise off the page in a breathless wall of language. It is a brilliant…approach [to] an enormous topic.” —Bloomsbury Review

“In this book-length poem, Anna Rabinowitz assembles a stirring testament to the impossibility of memory” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Reading DARKLING is like flipping through a scrapbook browned with time.” —South Florida Sun-Sentinel

“Ms. Rabinowitz limns the textures of life…and the interchange of hope and guilt…” —Dallas Morning News

“[DARKLING is an] effort of speaking in different voices, of traversing landscapes and generations, of trying to give words to what others were not able to enunciate…fashioning meanings and constructing images to make sense of the world.” —ForeWord Magazine

“…a multitude of voices…make a poem that respects the past’s inaccessibility, gently conjuring it without swamping it in fiction.” —Interim

“…DARKLING [is] a book-length poem by Anna Rabinowitz that completely blew me away” —Rachel Barenblatt in the Inkberry Newsletter

Winner of the Juniper Prize

Praise for At the Site of Inside Out

“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