Lynn
EmanuelBoOkS
![[cover of
Then, Suddenly]](suddenlybig.jpg)
Then, Suddenly--
A
selection of the Academy of American Poets' Poetry
Book Club
From
The
University of Pittsburgh Press,
Published
October 1999
Lynn Emanuel
Pitt Poetry Series
A reader and a writer don their
respective roles and embark on the journey of a book.
This is their story--ultimately a love story--darkly
funny, mournful, testy. It is about a reader who at times presides
over the page like a god, and at other times follows the leash of the
author's voice through the dark streets of the book like a dog, and
it is about a writer of determined slipperiness. As we read, we think
that each of us is The Reader, the one who knows the Real Story. But
the more we think we understand, the more the story moves away from
us--all is not what it seems.
This eagerly awaited
third volume by the poet whose work The New York
Times described as "at once charmed and frightening" is a book of
high-spirited subversiveness, a work of argument, seduction, and a
relentless devotion to language. Then, Suddenly--
bristles
with the wound of the author's voice--insistent, vital,
hilarious, and iconoclastic--tearing away at the confinement
of the page and at the distance between the page and the reader.
Emanuel's images are dazzling. She creates a performance that
isfearsome and funny in its portrayal of the argument between the
work of the text and the world of the body. Gettysburg Review
has called her a writer of "exquisite craftsmanship" who can "strike
from language ... images chiseled clean as bas-relief." Then,
Suddenly-- is a book of spectacle and verve, part elegy,
part
vaudeville.
"Lynn
Emanuel's poems have a rare power: they connect
to the world through estrangement, Here is a
restless, seeking intelligence, finding itself
in beautiful language that makes the reader
feel at home in sounds and cadences and
figures, even while the homelessness of each of
the poet's perceptions adds to the poem's
force. This is a moving, challenging book."
--Eavan Boland on Then,
Suddenly--
"I think, in this book, Lynn
Emanuel has come into her own. There is some
Eliot here, some Stein, some Matthews. She
carries self-consciousness to the shrieking
edge--and almost falls in. Well, she
does fall in. She is a master of the negative,
but she doesn't sigh in boredom; she yells in
pain. Her vision is original; so is her
language. A terrific book!"
--Gerald Stern on Then,
Suddenly--
"The trajectory of Lynn Emanuel's
dazzling career has been in the direction of
self-consciousness; Then, Suddenly--
questions even further the relationship between
writer and reader: a tango, a coupling, a gamble in
which the author seems to hold all the cards. But
not so fast, say the dead, who confound and
complicate her intent; Not so fast, says time. Or
Faster, haunting these sophisticated, deeply knowing
poems into troubled life." --Mark
Doty on Then, Suddenly--
Last Updated: 08/07/99
Created By: J.H.
Brugos