Sally Van Doren – författare

Playfully invading the traditional territories of poetry, Sally Van Doren throws into question form, subject matter, and the sound and meaning of words. The poems in Sex at Noon Taxes mix straightforward narrative, midwestern vernacular, and linguistic ambivalence, embedded in which is a struggle between the mind and the body. While one poem admonishes the reader to ""Forget the phonics / of the focal/fecal. Phrase, / fashion, and effuse,"" in another the speaker says, ""I refine my sense of / pain when you touch me / with something blue."" A preoccupation with the visual, artists, and artwork seeps through many of these imagistic minitexts. These poems look for release in descriptions of physical acts and in intricate manipulations of language. Sometimes they find it: ""Along comes the sentence to / break up the monotony of possession."" More often, though, the questions they pose resist answers: ""What extravagant / commodity is sex?"" and ""Which el- / lipsis omits love?"" Gender identification blurs as the poems probe theories of articulation and investigate the geographies of language and love. Through wordplay and word work, these poems travel a tightly crafted sphere of emotions and ideas.""Preposition""The before took us right up tothe after, even though undermeant we should not try over,from being stronger than to,up shying from its ascentin the face of down. I heldon to you and beside youI became with and about.In our around, the near/farcould turn away and toward,within the without. By my aboveand your below, the wheres andwhens retreated, leaving timeand space stranded, in off, on out.

Sally Van Doren's imaginative new collection offers bold and beguiling poems. Uttered in intense lyrical bursts that reflect the poet's command of language both familiar and strange, the visually dramatic moments gathered here probe the time-honored themes of love and death with candor and intimacy. The poems range in tone from a tongue-twisting search for identity to a plea to engage others in the refutation of pain: ""My discreet sorrow / Hides in the dichotomy / Of your duplicitous palm / Offer me your hand / Our patty-cake will / Clap away antipathy."" Drawing from sources as varied as the Bible, pop music, American politics, Italian Renaissance architecture, and poetry from Catullus to Wallace Stevens to OuLiPo, the poems unite in their unabashed examination of the uncertainties of life. In several poems, the voice of Eve reimagines the repercussions of original sin. In others, Van Doren chronicles vehicles of present-day suffering, ""e-mailed poultices,"" ""day-glo ambulances,"" and being ""drafted against our will into kinetic wilderness."" Throughout the collection, recognitions of despair are counterbalanced by assertions of hope: ""we dug for glory / for healing not / born from pain.

Sally Van Doren's Promise features a series of short lyric poems, contemplative vignettes of daily life that examine friendship, marriage, and family with a veneer of playfulness. These poems take us into a space where a year is compressed into minutes and a small trickle of memory floods the mind. Van Doren, a visual artist as well as a poet, composes word collages that help us to touch the promise underneath the surface and to make sense of the senseless.