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Rachel Mennies embraces the public/private duality of writing
letters in her latest collection of poems. Told through a
time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters chronicles the
relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she
loves. Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the
2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath, their love story
unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends
to Naomi-and occasionally Naomi's responses, as filtered through
the speaker's retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first
from the use of found texts, next from the speaker's personal
observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness,
and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences. As the speaker
discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the
struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes
reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety
and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and
emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and
its stakes-a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short,
but precarious distance.
Rachel Mennies embraces the public/private duality of writing
letters in her latest collection of poems. Told through a
time-honored epistolary narrative, The Naomi Letters chronicles the
relationship between a woman speaker and Naomi, the woman she
loves. Set mostly over the span of a single year encompassing the
2016 Presidential Election and its aftermath, their love story
unfolds via correspondence, capturing the letters the speaker sends
to Naomi-and occasionally Naomi's responses, as filtered through
the speaker's retelling. These letter-poems form a braid, first
from the use of found texts, next from the speaker's personal
observations about her bisexuality, Judaism, and mental illness,
and lastly from her testimonies of past experiences. As the speaker
discovers she has fallen in love with Naomi, her letters reveal the
struggles, joys, and erasures she endures as she becomes
reacquainted with her own body following a long period of anxiety
and suicidal ideation, working to recover both physically and
emotionally as she grows to understand this long-distance love and
its stakes-a love held by a woman for a woman, forever at a short,
but precarious distance.
Your Blue and the Quiet Lament records the textures of grief after
a cousin's murder at the hands of the Syrian state reaches the poet
through a long-distance phone call. The poems trace a narrative of
arrest, imprisonment, and torture in Syria and interweave the
difficulties a family experiences in the diaspora. Shifting between
the death of poet Federico GarcÃa Lorca and that of her cousin,
Lubna's poetry contends with personal loss by distancing the
meaning of one death through the proxy of another. Yet the
distortion of distance is already there—in the language, in the
geographic space, in time, in the grief itself—tinged with blue.
As she recalls childhood memories and imagines conversations with
her dead cousin, Lubna's poetry whispers, calls out, sings,
laments, pens letters, photographs, sketches, paints, and prays in
an attempt to exhaust grief.
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Lena - Poems (Paperback)
Cassie Pruyn, Rachel Mennies
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R458
R388
Discovery Miles 3 880
Save R70 (15%)
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Ships in 10 - 15 working days
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Cassie Pruyn's Lena asks new questions: why we love, why we grieve.
We've read elegies before, but not like this. A lush and unsparing
first book, Lena asks readers to understand love--crucially, a
first love, an erotic love-in the context not of a love lost but
instead of an identity gained: we must consider not only "was she
worth it?," but also "who has she made me?" Pruyn lets us feel what
lovers feel--the magnetism, the physicality, the tenderness, the
rage, the wondering--with language both musical and visceral. In
these poems, the landscape is a character in itself; the past is as
tangible as the present. Pruyn takes us to the "Lost Love Lounge,"
we ride in a "car / red as a dragon," and we observe the beloved
"stick herself in the belly with a needle" in the way "she used to
attach her cufflinks." This is love and grief raised to the highest
power; it is a debut not to be missed.
In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young
woman's relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced
world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and
different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love, and female
sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to
"our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies," a force somehow
responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines
survival, assimilation, and intermarriage, subjects bound together
by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speaker's
Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, The Glad Hand of God
Points Backwards lays bare the struggles and triumphs experienced
through a teenage girl's coming of age, showing the reader what it
means to become-and remain-a Jewish woman in America.
"Coming of age as a Jewish woman in America"
In her first poetry collection, Rachel Mennies chronicles a young
woman's relationship with a complicated God, crafting a nuanced
world that reckons with its past as much as it yearns for a new and
different future. These poems celebrate ritual, love, and female
sexuality; they bear witness to a dark history, and introduce us to
"our God, the / collector of stories / and bodies," a force somehow
responsible for both death and liberation. Here, Mennies examines
survival, assimilation, and intermarriage, subjects bound together
by complex, if sometimes compromised, ties to the speaker's
Judaism. Through wit and careful prosody, "The Glad Hand of God
Points Backwards "lays bare the struggles and triumphs experienced
through a teenage girl's coming of age, showing the reader what it
means to become--and remain--a Jewish woman in America.
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