Natasha Saje - Böcker

Windows and Doors is a poetry handbook that places poststructuralist and postmodern ways of thinking alongside formalist modes, making explicit points of overlap and tension that are usually tacit. Each of Natasha Sajé’s nine essays addresses a topic of central concern to readers and writers of poetry while also making an argument about poetic language and ideology. Foundational topics—diction, syntax, rhythm, surprise, figurative language, narrative, genre, book design, and performance—are explained through the lenses of theory, history, and philosophy and illuminated through vibrant examples from the works of numerous contemporary American poets.

The word “terroir” refers to the climate and soil in which something is grown. Natasha Sajé applies this idea to the environments that nurture and challenge us, exploring in particular how the immigrant experience has shaped her identity. She revisits people and literature across her life, including her experiences as the child of European refugees in suburban New Jersey, taken under the wing of a widowed neighbor; a winter spent waitressing in Switzerland; her marriage to a Jamaican man in Baltimore; and finally her marriage to a woman in Salt Lake City.This memoir-in-essays combines poetic lyricism with incisive commentary on nationality, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, and class. Reminding us that change is constant in our lives, Sajé asks how terroir creates identity. Throughout, the English language is her most fertile ground.

“[D]ivulges the spirit of a sensualist and the habits of a contemplative; sometimes vice versa. Colors are separated with the veracity of paint. Shifts in temperature are registered and background noises distinguished, not only for texture’s sake but for their essential contribution to the poems’ substance. Fine foods are sung and individual words lit. For company Sajé summons a curious assortment of lettered forbears including Cotton Mather, Henry Vaughan, Nietzsche, Proust, Gertrude Stein, and Mary Shelley. A virtuous and subtly depraved book is Bend.”—C.D. Wright

A vivarium is an enclosure for living things — plants or animals — which might likewise be said of a poem. With a vivacious sensibility and unruly leaps from elegiac to ironic, Sajé’s new book is an abecedarium, fully using the page, and challenging all manner of received wisdom. Employing lyrics, lists, arguments, narratives, and meditations, and including prose poems devoted to particular letters as well as invented visual or conceptual pieces, in Vivarium the alphabet is endowed with power far beyond usefulness. Form breathes life in this book, and the lived emotion of these poems defies death. “In Vivarium, Natasha Sajé, one of poetry’s most ludic and encyclopedic essayists, explores language — and the alphabet — in terms both acerbic and lush, exposing the roots of the world’s ills, and its many rooted pleasures. In a word, zowie!” — Mary Ruefle “Resourceful, restless, witty and substantially intelligent — what a rare combination of erudition and nimbleness this group of poems exhibits. Their range is marvelously wide in both form and tone… Each poem surprised me, taught me something, delighted and illuminated and stretched.” —Dean Young, in a citation for the Academy of American Poets’ 2008 Alice Fay di Castagnola Award