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Scriptorium: Poems

(Paperback)


Publishing Details

Full Title:

Scriptorium: Poems

Contributors:

By (Author) Melissa Range
Foreword by Tracy K. Smith

ISBN:

9780807094440

Series Number:

1

Publisher:

Beacon Press

Imprint:

Beacon Press

Publication Date:

1st September 2018

UK Publication Date:

31st October 2016

Country:

United States

Classifications

Readership:

General

Fiction/Non-fiction:

Non Fiction

Dewey:

811.6

Physical Properties

Physical Format:

Paperback

Number of Pages:

96

Dimensions:

Width 150mm, Height 224mm, Spine 8mm

Weight:

136g

Description

A collection of poems exploring questions of religious and linguistic authority, from medieval England to contemporary Appalachia A National Poetry Series winner, selected and with a foreword by Tracy K. Smith The poems in Scriptorium are primarily concerned with questions of religious authority. The medieval scriptorium, the central image of the collection, stands for that authority but also for its subversion; it is both a place where religious ideas are codified in writing and a place where an individual scribe might, with a sly movement of the pen, express unorthodox religious thoughts and experiences. In addition to exploring the ways language is used, or abused, to claim religious authority, Scriptorium also addresses the authority of the vernacular in various time periods and places, particularly in the Appalachian slang of the author's East Tennessee upbringing. Throughout Scriptorium, the historical mingles with the personal- poems about medieval art, theology, and verse share space with poems that chronicle personal struggles with faith and doubt.

Reviews

Ranges poems show an expertise with form from sonnets to anagrams...A collection not to be missed.
Library Journal, Starred Review

She avoids both folksiness and stuffiness by filling poems with incident, description, elegy, meditation, recollection, identification, and more...This book is going to dazzle a lot of poetry readers.
Booklist, Starred Review

This collection, as fiercely contemporary as it is historical, is both unapologetically literary and egalitarian as hell. Its poetry that is truly ...for everyone / like language, like color, like air.
Birmingham Poetry Review

Scriptorium, lush with musicality, is perhaps more sophisticated for its restraints, and her deft formal touch remains on display with sonnets, terza rima, ghazal, cento, and villanelles.
Appalachian Journal

Throughout Scriptorium, Range finds the poetic in the colloquial, the past in the present, the transcendent in the immanent. Perhaps her most impressive achievement, however, is her ability to turn engagement with the long history of metrical form in English into a foundation for strikingly innovative poetic technique.
Cat Fitzpatrick, The Boston Review

Each of the poems in Scriptorium is a marvel. What may likely strike you on the first read is Ranges remarkable facility with form. She moves nimbly, naturally, with comfort and acrobatic delight through the rigors of sonnets, villanelles, anagrams, cento and the like...But what you will feel more than any of this, I am certain, is an urgent usefulness. These are poems for which form is not an end in itself.
Tracy K. Smith, from the foreword

Poetry is ongoing revelation, the spirit surging in new words and shapes, in fresh forms. Yet rarely have I had such a vivid sense of this as while reading Scriptorium. This is revelatory poetry of a high order. Range has a finely tuned ear, a furtive and fertile imagination, and a gloriously rooted sense of that great word-hoard, the English language itself.
Jay Parini, author of New and Collected Poems, 1975-2015

Author Bio

Melissa Range is the author of the poetry collection Horse and Rider (Texas Tech University Press, 2010) and the recipient of awards and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the American Antiquarian Society, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, the Fine Arts Work Center (Provincetown, MA), and the Rona Jaffe Foundation. Originally from East Tennessee, Range currently lives in Wisconsin and teaches at Lawrence University.

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