Biographical note: James Reiss is the author of four poetry books, the most recent of which, Ten Thousand Good Mornings, was nominated for the 2002 Pulitzer Prize. His work has appeared in such places as The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, and The Paris Review, plus many anthologies, textbooks, and Web sites. He has won numerous national and regional literary awards and grants. He is Professor of English and Editor of Miami University Press in Oxford, Ohio.
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EAN13: 9781844710317 ISBN-10: 1844710319 ISBN-13: 9781844710317 Author: James Reiss Title: Riff on Six Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 20-Sep-03 Extent: 180pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 11 mm Weight: 270 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 11.99 Price: USD 17.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation:WINNER OF THE 2005 HELEN AND LAURA KROUT MEMORIAL OHIOANA POETRY AWARD
This book contains poems from Reiss’s first four books, plus rollicking new work from his fifth volume, Slap Me Five, and his sixth collection of laugh-outloud rhyming satirical war verse, A Child’s Garden of Evil. As one reviewer said, this book “will command a wide audience.”
Main description:WINNER OF THE 2005 HELEN AND LAURA KROUT MEMORIAL OHIOANA POETRY AWARDThis book contains poems from Reiss’s first four books, as well as rollicking new work in his fifth volume, Slap Me Five and his sixth collection of darkly humorous and downright hilarious rhyming satirical anti-war verse, A Child’s Garden of Evil. From the elegies and spiels in The Breathers (1974), to the New York poems and Asian travel pieces in Express (1983), to the homages to Mexico and the narratives in The Parable of Fire (1996), to the cris de coeur and “staircase stanzas” in Ten Thousand Good Mornings (2001), Reiss uses language memorably—memorizably—with musical and painterly effects.
Whether you go along with New York Times Book Review critic Helen Vendler, who wrote of The Breathers: “In Reiss, poems are laid in drawers, folded in books; memories are like pictures cut out of magazines, inertia and insomnia are the two forms of life. Pursued by the same phantoms, which reappear on the telephone, in sequential rooms, in snapshots, in slides, Reiss writes them down in an accomplished plain style, with a momentum carrying whole poems along on the humming acceleration of a single sentence”— or you listen to Laurel Blossom, who wrote in The American Book Review, of Ten Thousand Good Mornings: “Reiss can deploy rhyme, alliteration, assonance, the caesura, and a variety of poetic forms, from couplets to concrete, just for the fun of it, and with a skill that, more often than not, works for the poems rather than against them”—Reiss will not disappoint you.
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Table of contents: from The Breathers (1974) The Breathers The Green Tree The Blue Snow The Post Card People in Sunlight Come Out, Come Out! Even Now On Hot Days ¿Habla Usted Español? This Poem Crystal from Express (1983) A Candy Store in Washington Heights Approaching Washington Heights Sueños Brothers A Day in Ohio By the Steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York Is My City Arigato Means Thank You Elegy for Jay Silverheels (1920-1980) Pumas Express Nixon Anna’s Song On Learning the People’s Republic of China Has Lifted Its Ban on Beethoven Passage from The Parable of Fire (1996) Dark Conceit Castrati in Caesar’s Court Whitman at a Grain Depot Carnegie Hill Memorial Quilt, Central Park Guatemalan Worry Dolls Mexico Supper in Tiberias Ammunition Hill My Mother’s Feet The Blue Bird Inn Game Woodland Sketches Dorland Crabbing Eclipse the Dark: My Fiftieth Birthday, July 11, 1991 from Ten Thousand Good Mornings (2001) My Daughters in New York Cycle Woodruff Court Lily Girls in Rogers Park Volunteers in East Africa Spend the Night in a Greek-Owned Hotel, Fall 1963 Lake Street Table Talk A Rented House in the Country Windbreak Hotel Giacomo Conference Call Skimming Toward Blue Prelude from Slap Me Five (2002) Slap Me Five Woodcliff Lake Edgar Allan Poe Looks Up from His McGuffey Reader Getting High in Tyler, Texas O My People Yippee for the Demos Voices Riff on Six Reuven Ben-Yosef Paintable Lady Cecilia Products The Albatross Nine-One-One Oh-No As Minutes Go By A Child’s Garden of Evil Honey and Hemlock The Nightshade Arias Carols for Caligula
Now that we have liberation, We must learn our occupation Is to occupy the nation We have conquered. Subjugation Is the wrong term for salvation, Just as Islam’s desecration Means Redemption in translation. English offers consolation To bad Arabs whose low station Was assured throughout creation By our Christian affirmation That the Koran’s dedication To Muhammad meant damnation.
Now that our relentless raiders, Bible–toters and Darth Vaders Playing war games like third–graders, Have invaded, are invaders, We must call ourselves crusaders Or brave–hearted soldier–traders Who will pay. No Arab–haters, We are truly saints, Ralph Naders Celebrating Mass and Seders With Iraquis: bikers, skaters Full of Yo’s and See you later’s, Loving, loved emancipators Armed with brains like mashed potaters.
Review quote: Filled with the unpredictable details that fill city life, Reiss’ poems carry the reader along, like fellow passengers in the express subway car, traveling through familiar (sometimes not so friendly) locales while following the poet’s train of throught.… Whatever slice of life he chooses, Reiss’s typical American experiences come through-fresh, affectionately direct, touchingly true.
Booklist
Review quote: Throughout this exemplary collection, the actual is perceived in all its four dimensions: the three that are described by the physical world, and the fourth which lies just behind and is described only by the noumenal eye…. Even a casual conversational style does not come without hard labor. In these poems, the labor is of course invisible to us. We have only these jazzy lines: poems that are enjoyable and, in several instances, significant.
Frederick Smock American Book Review
Review quote: Although these poems do not make grand pronouncements they have as their source what Howard Nemerov called ‘great primary human drama,’ and they are always interesting and often moving.
Peter Meinke The New Republic
Review quote: In Reiss, poems are laid in drawers, folded in books; memories are like pictures cut out of magazines, inertia and insomnia are the two forms of life. Pursued by the same phantoms, which reappear on the telephone, in sequential rooms, in snapshots, in slides, Reiss writes them down in an accomplished plain style, with a momentum carrying whole poems along on the humming acceleration of a single sentence.
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