The Cold War
Kathleen Ossip
(Author)
21,000+ Reviews
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Description
100 Best Books of 2011, Publishers Weekly2011 Notable Books, Academy of American Poets
From the powerful drama and formal boldness of "The Status Seekers" to the various theories of criticism in "The Nervousness of Yvor Winters," Kathleen Ossip's second collection takes up the crazed threads of modern experience and all its contradictions. Each poem, each new approach is an attempt to extract something concrete from an era not yet past. Yet as the poet probes and wonders, she gradually reveals another narrative, built on strangled emotion and subdued lyricism. The Cold War is jagged and thought-provoking. It questions the origins and premises of contemporary American culture.
Product Details
Price
$14.95
$13.90
Publisher
Sarabande Books
Publish Date
May 17, 2011
Pages
72
Dimensions
6.5 X 8.9 X 0.3 inches | 0.35 pounds
Language
English
Type
Paperback
EAN/UPC
9781932511956
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Become an affiliateAbout the Author
Kathleen Ossip: Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Search Engine, which was selected by Derek Walcott for the APR/Honickman First Book Prize and nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and of Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, The Washington Post, Fence, The Believer, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School in New York, where she is Editor-at-Large for LIT, and the Poetry Editor of Women's Studies Quarterly. Ossip was born and raised in Albany, New York, in a large Italian-Irish family, and now lives outside of New York City with her husband and daughter.
Reviews
Ossip's long-awaited second book is a surprising poetic powerhouse that interweaves the personal and the political in ways that are as aesthetically exciting as they are emotionally rich. The book opens with a jumpy ode on melancholy that takes off, as two of the best of these poems do, from a hefty quote from a weighty book (in this poem's case Karl Menninger's The Human Mind) and the words "In those days" "Melancholia, we cherished," writes Ossip, and, later, "The intellect's/ a pissy thing, a fortress." Here and elsewhere, Ossip deftly mixes linguistic registers in poems that blend aspects of confessional writing, social and literary criticism, and history. The book's centerpiece is the traumatized, post-9/11 "Document," a long series of sentences and fragments that attempt to manage an unshakable feeling of danger: "Put space between you and the attack. Oh fruity word!" Or the centerpiece might be the essay/ poetic sequence/ tribute called "The Nervousness of Yvor Winters," which takes off from Winters's life and work to finally ask the question, "Do we want to understand poems, or do we want poems that understand us?" The book gains other dimensions from further sequences and prose fables, such as "The Deer Path," in which "One deer sped by in a small, trucklike vehicle and shouted FUCK! at me through the open window in an unmistakably cruel way." Ossip is about to take the poetry world off guard with what is surely among the most various, powerful, and representative (of post-terror America) poetry collections of the past few years. (May)
--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Ossip's pieces invite our understanding, while her refusal to make wholes defies it; that defiance, too, belongs to our time."
--Stephen Burt, The Nation Ms. Ossip conjures delightful and unexpected muses in this socio-poetical exploration of post-World War II America, taking as her starting points Karl A. Menninger, who wrote "The Human Mind"; Vance Packard, author of "The Status Seekers"; and that scalawag of orgone energy, Wilhelm Reich. In this shrewd and ambitious work Ms. Ossip participates in a very old-fashioned sport, parsing the American mind through the filter of cold war paranoia.
--Dana Jennings, The New York Times "A book of impressive breadth, The Cold War, for all its sprawling forms and unexpected source texts and materials, also communicates the poet's emotional relationship to her country and her art."
--American Poet Ossip's book is a rebuke to the idea that politics and the personal can't be fruitfully combined in poetry.
--Anis Shivani, Huffington Post
--Publishers Weekly, starred review "Ossip's pieces invite our understanding, while her refusal to make wholes defies it; that defiance, too, belongs to our time."
--Stephen Burt, The Nation Ms. Ossip conjures delightful and unexpected muses in this socio-poetical exploration of post-World War II America, taking as her starting points Karl A. Menninger, who wrote "The Human Mind"; Vance Packard, author of "The Status Seekers"; and that scalawag of orgone energy, Wilhelm Reich. In this shrewd and ambitious work Ms. Ossip participates in a very old-fashioned sport, parsing the American mind through the filter of cold war paranoia.
--Dana Jennings, The New York Times "A book of impressive breadth, The Cold War, for all its sprawling forms and unexpected source texts and materials, also communicates the poet's emotional relationship to her country and her art."
--American Poet Ossip's book is a rebuke to the idea that politics and the personal can't be fruitfully combined in poetry.
--Anis Shivani, Huffington Post