ANATOMY ERRATA (OSU JOURNAL AWARD POETRY)

$14.95
by JUDITH HALL

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The winner of the 1997 Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award for poetry, the author's second book of poems meditates on the forces of women's bodies, sexuality, gender, and sickness in finely detailed verse. Simultaneous. UP. This second collection from Hall, whose first book To Put the Mouth To (Morrow, 1992) was selected for the National Poetry Series, won this year's Ohio State University Press/The Journal Award in Poetry. A relatively short manuscript footnoted in the style of Marianne Moore, it pulls Moore's kind of punctilious detail, formal music, and fantastic flights into the decidedly unladylike territory of breast cancer as suffered by the narrator's deceased mother, famous victims like Shirley Temple Black and Ingrid Bergman, and ultimately the narrator herself. Many of these poems were written out of rage; "Mother," for example, is a tirade that reappropriates parts of better-known poems: "For how adult is it to wander lonely as a fool, Slouching toward snowy wood/ So often in the middle of the journey." Unfortunately, it is hard to determine exactly what this mother did wrong besides dress too elegantly and possibly pass along the genetic malady of cancer. In this difficult, emotional terrain, however, it is to Hall's credit that she rarely loses control of the writing. The odd, brilliant introductory poem, for instance, in which a girl experiences her mother as a hovering butterfly is powerfully allusive, erotic, and utterly convincing. A strong second collection.?Ellen Kaufman, Dewey Ballantine Law Lib., New York. Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. Used Book in Good Condition

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