Maxine Chernoff

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Biographical note:  Maxine Chernoff is the author of seven books of poetry and six books of fiction. Her most recent titles are World: Poems 1991-2001 (Salt Modern Poets) and Some of Her Friends that Year: New and Selected Stories (Coffee House Press, 2002). Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion, was a New York Times Notable Book of 1993. Twice a finalist in fiction for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, she is chair of Creative Writing at San Francisco State University. Co-editor of New American Writing. She lives in Mill Valley, California, with Paul Hoover and their three children.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710386
ISBN-10:  1844710386
ISBN-13:  9781844710386
Author:  Maxine Chernoff
Title:  Evolution of the Bridge
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  01-Mar-04
Extent:  144pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  9 mm
Weight:  216 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 10.99
Price:  USD 16.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  Evolution of the Bridge: Selected Prose Poems collects work from Maxine Chernoff’s previous volumes written over the past thirty years. It features such classics as “The Last Aurochs,” “A Vegetable Emergency,” “Utopia TV Store,” “New Faces of 1952” and provides the reader with ample evidence that Maxine Chernoff continues to be one of the most significant practitioners of the prose poem in America today.

As Michael Benedikt, editor of The Prose Poem: An International Anthology, said of her work, “Underlying all of Maxine Chernoff’s prose poems is the possibility of magic.” Writing in the fabulist mode, she explores the bizarre in everyday life and questions the very rules of engagement with language, social norms, and politics. The reader is jolted out of his complacency by the lens of her writing. “If the world could look through Maxine’s eyes for even five minutes every day, there would be no need whatsoever for the pompous self-righteousness that currently spoils the polis. Her views of human life are wise and corrective tales that cure by correcting perspective” (Andrei Codrescu).

Her abiding interest in the prose poem has led to a collection that not only shows what she has done to revitalize the form but also where it may go from here. Witness the new prose poems in the section collected from World: Poems 1991–2001. As Rachel Loden notes, “The absurdist playlets-cum-vaudeville skits are some of the best fun ever vouchsafed to a poetry book. Each of these routines is a valiant attempt to limn the shape of human logic, a project that turns out to be both daunting and curiously satisfying.… What’s left is the spine of language and the rippled furrows of the human brain. And perhaps Groucho Marx and Margaret Dumont at war in a sort of paradise. “ Ethan Paquin, referring to the same dialogue-based prose poems states that “these comedic scenes are remarkable for their transcendence of comedy. It is as if the speakers were engaged in the world’s final debate. The only question is `Which world?’”

Table of contents:
from The Last Aurochs and A Vegetable Emergency (1976)
The Moat
A Vegetable Emergency
The Broom
In the Moonlight
The Annual Picnic
High Rise
The Birth of a Chair
The Last Aurochs
from Utopia TV Store (1979)
The Sitting
Toothache
His Pastime
Sailing
Water Music
The Fan
A Lesson in Cause and Effect
Fred Astaire
Top Hand with a Gun
Body and Soul
Van Gogh’s Ear
Hats Around the World
Phantom Pain
Vanity, Wisconsin
The Inner Life
The World of Ideas
Evolution of the Bridge
Subtraction
Kill Yourself with an Objet D’art
The Man Struck Twenty Times by Lightning
The Dead Letter Office
Rehearsal
The Limits of Science
The Fetus
A Definition
The Boat
On My Birthday
What the Dead Eat
An Abridged Bestiary
The Meaning of Anxiety
The Insomniac’s Notebook
A Birth
The Horizontal Brigade
Utopia TV Store
The Shoe and the City
A Sense of Humor
Anonymous Thoughts from Home
The Woman Who Straddled the Globe
In the Hospital
The Time of the Plague
The Stand-Up Tragedians
New Year’s Eve
from New Faces of 1952 (1985)
Lost and Found
Biographia Literaria
The Smell Convention
Spring
Prophecy
Identity Principle
A Name
Sotto Voce
Sayings of My Distant Uncle
Miss Congeniality
Hairdo
Learning to Listen
Animal Magnetism
How We Went
Anger
The Edible Harp
Beginning, Middle, End
The Unzipped
from Leap Year Day : New and Selected Poems (1991)
How Lies Grow
The Apology Store
The New Money
from World : Poems 1991-2001
Nomads
Beauty
Heavenly Bodies
Wearing Moe
Her Many Occupations
Guilt
Husband and Wife
An Epiphany
Killing Himself
The Method
The Sound
Wash
Uncollected Prose Poems
Five Possible Moments
Night Thoughts
The Heimlich Maneuver
A Valentine
Loving a Short Man
Simple Gifts
Origin
The Commonplace
Quizzing Glass
The Unbuilding

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Excerpt from book:  

Evolution of the Bridge

Guaranteed in every model is a lifespan shorter than your own. The bridge of wet gardenias is a designed as a study in pathos. Citizens weep past the flowery rails. Commuters are accustomed to detouring at the string bean bridge. What can provide a better excuse for your late arrival at work? The boss, himself unable to cross the rubber band drawbridge, will praise your good sense in the matter, promote you to district manager. It is true that a foolhardy sort met his demise on the bridge of pancakes, but that is the only recorded fatality. Consider the greater good. Towns have sprung up around these passing fancies. A village thrives at the foot of a suspension bridge made of feathers. The colorful plumage draws tourists from miles around. On the green, city fathers have erected a sweet potato statue of their first mayor. At every rainfall a different citizen is sculpted into prominence. Perishable bridges have also relieved the boredom of scenery. Sunday drives are taken with a new sense of urgency. And optimism is flourishing. No longer do girders shiny as new ideas ridicule our own decline. We are treated to an ever changing landscape as monuments are blissfully forgotten.

Unpublished endorsement:  Maxine Chernoff's prose poems share the metapoetic extravagance of the likes of Henri Michaux, Jorge Luis Borges and Julio Cortázar. Evolution of the Bridge should establish her as one of America's great fabulists.

Michel Delville

Review quote:  Chernoff is a funny, invincible poet. Reading her is like watching the triumphant survival of wit and intelligence.

Jayne Anne Phillips

Review quote:  If the world could look through Maxine’s eye for five minutes every day, there would be no need whatsoever for the pompous self-righteousness that currently spoils the polis. Her views of human life are wise and instructive tales that cure by correcting perspective. She is one of our best zaddiks. It’s the truth.

Andrei Codrescu

Review quote:  … wit, common sense, an exacting awareness of the everyday bizarre, diverse personae, roots upended most tellingly, solid stuff …I haven’t laughed so hard since Kenneth Koch’s Thank You.

Kenward Elmslie

Review quote:  There is no anticipating either the music or the logic of Maxine Chernoff’s poems. This is the reward.

Library Journal