Brave Disguises
Gray Jacobik
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
Winner of the 2001 Associated Writing Programs' Award in Poetry Selected by Marilyn Chin A poet with an artist's eye, a painter with an ear for language, Gray Jacobik creates poems out of the mundane and extraordinary moments of our lives. Mirroring the structure of a Pollock painting, elegizing Larry Levis and avocados, reflecting on Johnny Depp's "terribly surreal" life, embarking upon a seventy-two-line meditation on the color blue, exposing a lover's--or a mother's--secrets, Jacobik's poems are mature, elegant, and crackling with energy.
Product Details
Price
$18.00
$16.74
Publisher
University of Pittsburgh Press
Publish Date
July 24, 2002
Pages
88
Dimensions
5.54 X 8.46 X 0.28 inches | 0.28 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9780822957881
BISAC Categories:
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About the Author
Gray Jacobik, a professor of literature at Eastern Connecticut State University, received the Juniper Prize for her The Double Task and the X. J. Kennedy Poetry Prize for The Surface of Last Scattering.
Reviews
It is very rare that a poet is able to meld the poetry of the body and the poetry of the mind. I believe Jacobik has done so in Brave Disguises, and has done so gracefully.-- "Marilyn Chin"
At the center of these poems is a writer who is willing to open herself fully to the world's and living's beautiful strangeness and capricious painfulness. . . . Jacobik's poems always reach for, and often miraculously translate, the 'scintillate possibilities' within and beyond our reach.-- "Robert Cording"
These are poems of arriving and vanishing, mergings of classical concerns with dot-coms, blunt sexuality with wounded prayers. Debris and shabby truths are acknowledged and transformed into the Good. A lucid poetry, expertly crafted, amazing work.-- "Dick Allen"
Poet Marilyn Chin . . . says Jacobik merges poetry of the mind and poetry of the body. Her consideration of "Breasts" wraps physical and psychological reasons for anxiety about those organs in simple, sensual appreciation of them, ultimately to joyous effect. The villanelle "A Paradox," however, bitterly ponders a sister left in a vegetative state by an accident, to eventuate in the opposite effect, despite depending on similar though grimmer play between body and mind. Both those poems express the part of Jacobik's work that is more concerned with the body, and they come later in the book, after a first part full of more apparently mental poems about art. In those, aesthetic reactions sometimes yield nagging physicalities; in "Surrealisme," Jacobik stunningly portrays how an artistic conception forged by cafe loungers altered general reality so that now "few can imagine permanency or integrity in anything." In "Existence as Performance," she argues a reverse process, that by which stars - her example is Johnny Depp - get lost in their roles, for themselves, perhaps, as well as their audiences: flesh becomes conception. Jacobik's poems require constant attention to their mind-body interplay, but her skillful prosody, straightforward syntax, and common vocabulary make that gratifying work.-- "Booklist, starred review"
There is a rawness of personal truth, the shabbiness of things done out of necessity, of things done to one against one's will, and yet the chance to find beauty in the mundane, meaning the accumulated daily moments that are forgotten or spruned or categorized as detritus, but in which she can find transcendence, or some power in transforming these moments, or if neither of these at least the keen eye to record such particulars.-- "Literal Latte"
At the center of these poems is a writer who is willing to open herself fully to the world's and living's beautiful strangeness and capricious painfulness. . . . Jacobik's poems always reach for, and often miraculously translate, the 'scintillate possibilities' within and beyond our reach.-- "Robert Cording"
These are poems of arriving and vanishing, mergings of classical concerns with dot-coms, blunt sexuality with wounded prayers. Debris and shabby truths are acknowledged and transformed into the Good. A lucid poetry, expertly crafted, amazing work.-- "Dick Allen"
Poet Marilyn Chin . . . says Jacobik merges poetry of the mind and poetry of the body. Her consideration of "Breasts" wraps physical and psychological reasons for anxiety about those organs in simple, sensual appreciation of them, ultimately to joyous effect. The villanelle "A Paradox," however, bitterly ponders a sister left in a vegetative state by an accident, to eventuate in the opposite effect, despite depending on similar though grimmer play between body and mind. Both those poems express the part of Jacobik's work that is more concerned with the body, and they come later in the book, after a first part full of more apparently mental poems about art. In those, aesthetic reactions sometimes yield nagging physicalities; in "Surrealisme," Jacobik stunningly portrays how an artistic conception forged by cafe loungers altered general reality so that now "few can imagine permanency or integrity in anything." In "Existence as Performance," she argues a reverse process, that by which stars - her example is Johnny Depp - get lost in their roles, for themselves, perhaps, as well as their audiences: flesh becomes conception. Jacobik's poems require constant attention to their mind-body interplay, but her skillful prosody, straightforward syntax, and common vocabulary make that gratifying work.-- "Booklist, starred review"
There is a rawness of personal truth, the shabbiness of things done out of necessity, of things done to one against one's will, and yet the chance to find beauty in the mundane, meaning the accumulated daily moments that are forgotten or spruned or categorized as detritus, but in which she can find transcendence, or some power in transforming these moments, or if neither of these at least the keen eye to record such particulars.-- "Literal Latte"
