Assorted Poems by Susan Wheeler

Product Details

Synopsis

Assorted Poems is a generous selection from the first four books by one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary poetry. In Bag ‘o’ Diamonds (1993), Smokes (1998), Source Codes (2001), and Ledger (2005), Susan Wheeler has established herself as a poet of rare gifts. Her work is allusive and searching, sweeping over time and place—from the art of the Northern Renaissance to corporate logos—observing and exploring everything with characteristic precision and intelligence. The poems are both rigorous and free, taking on our culture: its beauties and cruelties, its relationship to the past and its uncertain future. Assorted Poems is a vibrantly thoughtful and entertaining book, a must-read from a poet whom Harold Bloom has called “an exuberant, subtle, endlessly inventive original.”

Publishers Weekly

Enticingly strange, and only occasionally incomprehensible, the vertiginous cityscapes, dissonant songs and fractured chronicles in Wheeler's verse, generously sampled in this selection from her four books, have attracted attention since her 1993 debut Bag o' Diamonds, whose jumpy verse offered, among other properties, "several years of careful steps across/ lower Manhattan. A looming sail in a nightmare." Subsequent volumes added songlike refrains and disturbing bits of Southern dialect, to a speaking self pressed and twisted to its limits: "The crux is alive at the fork of me." Cartoons and caricatures, pleas and imprecations, fall together in Wheeler's disturbing vortices. Just when her circumlocutions threaten to collapse into a shtick, she expands her range, and changes focus, in the exciting longer poems of Ledger(2005): more explicit in their attentions to history and to political economy, these poems use collage to follow the fates of their characters-the best of them juxtapose the poet's memories of her teenage shoplifting with scenes from the long-ago birth of the Dutch bourgeoisie. Two new poems cap the volume, Wheeler's first appearance from a New York trade press. If the selection's assorted registers, leaps and postmodern disconnections will baffle some readers, it should delight others ready for her smart effects. (Apr.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

More Reviews and Recommendations

Biography

Susan Wheeler is the author of four books of poetry and a novel. She lives in the New York area and teaches at Princeton.