Rebecca Wolff - Böcker

Selected by Robert Pinsky as one of five volumes published in 2001 in the National Poetry Series  In the Manderley of Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier's forbidding haven of mocking ghosts and secrets that refuse to remain buried, nothing is as it seems. So in this stunning debut collection by Rebecca Wolff, cities, partners, mothers, sisters, friends, and perfect strangers all disguise their true faces, while they who seek connection are "transported from one great gaping / hole in the fabric / of our knowledge to another."  No passage is too dark, no garden too tangled for the troubled dreamer of Manderley. Wolff turns a quicksilver gaze on a fluid world where both the real and the imaginary are transfigured. Tempering steely candor with a sophisticated delight in wordplay, these poems turn on a dime from the sensual to the eerie, the resigned to the hopeful, the comforting to the shocking. Each poem weaves together layers of dream, remembrance, and fantasy, distilling from romantic excess a gritty, spare language of truth-telling and surprise.

What is a poem?  Figment suggests myriad possible answers: a post-confession, a remnant lyric, an unerringly wistful invention. Rebecca Wolff makes use of every tool at her disposal to create charming, discomfiting poems, spiked with "shrewd summings-up" and "nervy, controlled lyric bursts"  (Maureen N. McLane, Chicago Tribune).

A bold, lyrical invention by an award-winning poet whose “gift for the gorgeous” won praise from Robert Pinsky. The King is a groundbreaking collection following a Self—a mother, lover, wife, thinker—in her fractured approach to the absolutes of pregnancy, postpartum depression, childrearing, belief, love, and epistemology. Here is a potent exploration of one woman’s coming together with the Other—her hard-won attachment to “the King.”from “Deeply Psychological”And then I surfaceda whole matrixor rubricmagical thinkingother kinds of thinkingbut in layers, you understand,with supremacya honeycomb.

"[Wolff's poems] are stylistic and tonal shapeshifters. Hip, contemplative, and dark and resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive, they're unnerving, funny, and occasionally subversive."-Bookforum Poet, novelist, and Fence Books founder Rebecca Wolff's internal monologue made external in poetry is uncanny. Her musical and darkly funny fourth collection, One Morning-, spans language, culture, art history, love, passion, grief, consumerism, environmental devastation, and the ekphrastic experience of pop and high culture. She experiments with torque, energy, narrative-two steps ahead of herself with the reader on her heels. From "Today Is a Good Day to Fly (Life Begins at)": I'm really digging this blue sky after so much rain with my regular menstrual cycle my Def Jam progesterone cream the blow-in (in my pocket) (ripped out) from in-flight music magazine "touching cloth" like the Romantics do. Insert jitney. Rebecca Wolff is the author of four collections of poetry, one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose. Her first book, Manderley, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky.Her second, Figment, was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Claudia Rankine and Eavan Boland. Her third, The King, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. Her novel The Beginners was published by Riverhead in 2011. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1998, Wolff founded the influential literary journal Fence; in 2001 she founded Fence Books and launched The Constant Critic website. Wolff lives in Hudson, New York, and is currently a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.

"[Wolff's poems] are stylistic and tonal shapeshifters. Hip, contemplative, and dark and resistant to the hunky-dory, the New Agey, and the prescriptive, they're unnerving, funny, and occasionally subversive."-Bookforum Poet, novelist, and Fence Books founder Rebecca Wolff's internal monologue made external in poetry is uncanny. Her musical and darkly funny fourth collection, One Morning-, spans language, culture, art history, love, passion, grief, consumerism, environmental devastation, and the ekphrastic experience of pop and high culture. She experiments with torque, energy, narrative-two steps ahead of herself with the reader on her heels. From "Today Is a Good Day to Fly (Life Begins at)": I'm really digging this blue sky after so much rain with my regular menstrual cycle my Def Jam progesterone cream the blow-in (in my pocket) (ripped out) from in-flight music magazine "touching cloth" like the Romantics do. Insert jitney. Rebecca Wolff is the author of four collections of poetry, one novel, and numerous pieces of occasional prose. Her first book, Manderley, was selected for the National Poetry Series by Robert Pinsky.Her second, Figment, was selected for the Barnard Women Poets Prize by Claudia Rankine and Eavan Boland. Her third, The King, was published by W. W. Norton in 2009. Her novel The Beginners was published by Riverhead in 2011. She is a graduate of the Iowa Writers Workshop and has been a fellow at the MacDowell Colony and the Millay Colony for the Arts. In 1998, Wolff founded the influential literary journal Fence; in 2001 she founded Fence Books and launched The Constant Critic website. Wolff lives in Hudson, New York, and is currently a fellow at the New York State Writers Institute at the University at Albany.

In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination. Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of the soul. Wolff is a poet that is unafraid to be a querent, not only of sages (“I only hang out with people / who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious / continuity”) but of language itself (“How else is one to know how to proceed / How is one to make a motion against— / electric word life”) In Slight Return, the journey is infinite and elusive—aspiring in the best way toward a point of diminishing returns and withholding any promise of a comfortable landing.

In her new collection, renowned publisher and poet Rebecca Wolff voyages in the myopia of American consumer consciousness—erotic regard, spiritual FOMO, gentrification, branding—without destination. Labyrinthine in their paradoxical musings and incisive in their witty recriminations, these poems grapple with the hubris and dysmorphia of the soul. Wolff is a poet that is unafraid to be a querent, not only of sages (“I only hang out with people / who are psychic / anything else is a / waste of precious / continuity”) but of language itself (“How else is one to know how to proceed / How is one to make a motion against— / electric word life”) In Slight Return, the journey is infinite and elusive—aspiring in the best way toward a point of diminishing returns and withholding any promise of a comfortable landing.