DOWN
By (Author) Sarah Dowling
Coach House Books
Coach House Books
11th November 2014
Canada
General
Non Fiction
811.6
Paperback
88
Width 133mm, Height 209mm
127g
How can we carve private spaces from discarded publics
DOWN takes junk language with cameos by Frank O'Hara, Frank Ocean, Aaliyah and the Temptations and distresses it, building sonically dense poems that are caught between the poignancy and flatness of their source texts. Disorientation and defamiliarization yank fresh feeling from banal sentiments in this playful collection.
Ive believed in Dowlings poems for a long time with you. Or maybe youre just now catching up to how the genius is working her machine on our minds Gravity of letter in the word measured and dispensed with inimitable grace. The words are familiar, yes, but we get them again from this magnificent poet who is not going to let us just trample the smallest of them. I have tremendous respect for any poet who strives to be even half as great as Sarah Dowling.
CAConrad
After all of the previous avant-gardes perpetual rediscoveries of Gertrude Stein's formal innovations, Dowling reminds us that her best poetry was, above all, sexy. Where Dowling surpasses is in her recognition of the phatic, the emphatic, the obsessive understanding of the cultural syntax of infatuation. Everything in DOWN is palpably cloudy in its thick description: I am starstruck.
Craig Dworkin
Sarah Dowling is the author of Security Posture and Birds & Bees. Sarah's poetry was included in the anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. She teaches at the University of Washington Bothell and is international editor at Jacket2.
Sarah Dowling is the author of Security Posture, winner of the Robert Kroetsch Award for Innovative Poetry, and Birds & Bees, a chapbook published by the Troll Thread collective. Her poetry was included in the anthology I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. She teaches at the University of Washington Bothell and is international editor at Jacket2.