I entered without words: Poems

(Hardback)

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An innovative and inviting book of poems about the places where language and landscape converge

In this strongly visual and environmentally engaged collection, award-winning poet and translator Jody Gladding explores landscape as a source of language in lyrics that operate as physical acts in three-dimensional space.

Composed and printed in a landscape format, these minimal, quiet, playful, meditative, and open-ended poems are experimental in form and inviting in subject. Drawing inspiration from poets like A. R. Ammons, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Jean Valentine, and visual artists like Ann Hamilton, Roni Horn, and Cecilia Vicua, Gladding discovers exciting spatial possibilities within the page itself by exploiting white space and varying typefaces. As the page opens into the compositional field that Mallarm, Ponge, and others conceived it to be, words constellate around bolded through lines to offer multiple, interwoven meanings, interacting with each other and the reader, who moves freely among them, to make poems that are spatial, nonlinear, and different with each reading. And, adding yet another dimension to the collection, many of the poems have facing-page French versions.

Landscape-oriented in every sense, I entered without words is an ambitious, innovative, and striking collection by a major poet.

Reviews

"A delicate and dynamic work, one that reaches toward a painterly simultaneity. One can, as the title suggests, enter the poems without words, only to find fields of them scattered across the pages, in spacious formations, at times rippling or craggy, ready to be combined and recombined."---Heather Green, Poetry Foundation
"Formally innovative. . . . [An] impressionistic, lyric work with an experimental edge." * Publishers Weekly *
"[An] intriguing new collection. . . . Readers with a taste for experimental poetry will be delighted." * Seven Days *
"An exciting odyssey through . . . three-dimensional pages, where sparse words make up what looks like gravitational fields."---Susan McCabe, Los Angeles Review of Books

Author Bio

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator who has published four previous collections of poetry. Her awards include MacDowell and Stegner fellowships, the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize. She lives in East Calais, Vermont.