Aleatory Allegories

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	Susan M. Schultz Aleatory Allegories
	Search for a word or phrase in this book … Biographical note: Susan M. Schultz teaches American literature at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. Her poetry is included in Talisman’s An Anthology of New (American) Poets. She edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (University of Alabama Press), and publishes essays and reviews widely. Her journal, Tinfish, specializes in experimental poetry from the Pacific. She lives in Kaneohe, Hawaii with her husband Bryant and is a lifelong fan of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. BIC Basic EAN13: 9781876857011 ISBN-10: 1876857013 ISBN-13: 9781876857011 Author: Susan M. Schultz Title: Aleatory Allegories Series: Salt Modern Poets Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTCH1 Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 01-Aug-00 Extent: 120pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 7 mm Weight: 180 gms Supplier: Gardners Books Supplier: Ingram Book Group Supplier: Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 9.99 Price: USD 15.95 Rights: World	See larger image PAPERBACK 20% off at the UK Bookstore! ~~£9.99~~ £7.99 20% off at the US Bookstore! ~~$15.95~~ $12.76	Short description/annotation: If “aleatory” refers to chance happenings, and “allegory” to the symbolic renderings of stories, then the premise of Aleatory Allegories is that, in a world governed by chance, there are still stories to be told and meanings to find within the flux. Schultz gloriously uncovers them in this remarkable first full-length collection. Main description: The poems gathered in Aleatory Allegories confront a world marked both by chance and by meaning – or, meaning in the chance events that play themselves out in language. As Schultz writes in the central long poem of this collection, “Holding Patterns,” “words are at once / leash and bungie cord, urging constancy / within risk[.]” The poems in her collection are, in equal measure, playful and thoughtful. They confront issues of desire, loss, and historical events (such as the OJ Simpson trial, JFK’s assassination), and they do so using wordplay and diction that mixes “poetic” and “popular” sources. At stake is the place of poetry in the contemporary world; the role of the poet in a land (Hawai`i) that is not hers: and the extent to which one can (still) tell stories that are true. Schultz combines a keen eye and ear for detail with a habit of mind that locates meaning in and out of particularity. Meet the author: Table of contents: Part One Mothers and Dinosaurs, Inc. Oceanic Feeling Promised Notes Budget Cuts Earthquake Dreams Sinister Wisdom Spare Ribs Foresight Prone in a Rowboat Repossessions Ad Agency Gossip Capital Gains Part Two Dear Doris Where’s Ralph? Ceci n’est pas The Wages of Synesthesia Authentic Lies Animal Soup Baudelaire’s Knee Part Three Star Gazing Homeless Metaphysics Questions for David Trial Documents Safe Haven Satyagraha Part Four Holding Patterns Part Five Performance Art Flak Jacket Ode From the Ginza District Imitations Ode Aleatory Allegory All the News that Fits Anecdote of the Antidote Love Poem (2) Course Requirements Crossing the Bar Exit Polls Major Funding for Despair At Chaos Gate Love Poem (1) Appreciation Sale View excerpt as PDF: Click here to view a sample (272 KB) Excerpt from book: Anecdote of the Antidote The antidote is not anecdote that ties the family’s binds— the binds that tear make tears, creasing cheeks with sodium solutions to griefs once felt through a generation’s hempwork. Old photos dispatch the great– ness of grandparents, aunts, uncles, and the rest to circumspect denial of time’s fugitive arc: in this afternoon’s wood booth they seem what they were, friends though civilized by interrupting years and the coughs of phones over water. Distance is time not space, abstract as meditations on practice: church– going, law, love, or cast glances meant to trap moments past recall. A plaster monk (string around his neck) stands beside bare–breasted vase supports, doubtless left unseen by legislators who mark the streets with approbation, or dis–. New laws enter into paradoxes syntax wreaks on words that lost their parts in shifts of vowel, alliterative revivals called off for lack of fervent furor: my friends have gone, another year, and this room betrays no secrets of childhood’s submission to moods best abandoned, like plastic milk cartons spilled from recycling bins. The year of has beens over, we turn our faces to the new turmoil of. Review quote: Wandering ruminations on the highs and lows and laminations in which we are wrapped in the in between. Susan Schultz’s uneasy critical intelligence scans the contemporary cultural landfill, making lyrically acidic etchings ‘as testimony to the day’s / partial illumination’. Listening, we find our share of aesthetic pleasure in the process that, if it doesn't set us loose, sets us sailing on seas of verse. Charles Bernstein Review quote: Schultz’s visionary syntax, humane and venturesome, never founders in its voyage across the larger questions, an endless fund of newly coined phrase sparkling in its wake. Randolph Healy Review quote: If Allegory gets pegged as a premodern trope and chance is the hallmark of postmodernism, then Schultz is interested in their collision as it plays out in the moral, natural and spiritual worlds of Hawaii. Publishers Weekly Review quote: In the end, it is those details, their fascinating and intricate connections, that make us see the complexity of the real world without the flattening attempts of media spins and sound bytes, without the superficiality we can fall for in lazily desiring simple pictures, obvious solutions. Schultz’s allegories reward their reading and deserve re-reading; their attention to the world demonstrates how it is in caring for the small, chance-met things that you find what you need. Janet Bowdan