Poetry. The poems gathered in ALEATORY ALLEGORIES confront a world marked both by chance and by meaning—or, meaning in the chance events that play themselves out in language. As Schultz writes in the central long poem of this collection, "Holding Patterns," "words are at once / leash and bungie cord, urging constancy / within risk[.]" The poems in her collection are, in equal measure, playful and thoughtful. They confront issues of desire, loss, and historical events (such as the OJ Simpson trial, JFK's assassination), and they do so using wordplay and diction that mixes "poetic" and "popular" sources. At stake is the place of poetry in the contemporary world; the role of the poet in a land (Hawai'i) that is not hers: and the extent to which one can (still) tell stories that are true. Schultz combines a keen eye and ear for detail with a habit of mind that locates meaning in and out of particularity.

Author City: HONOLULU, HI USA

Susan M. Schultz is a poet, critic, and publisher who lives in Kane`ohe, Hawai`i on the island of O`ahu. She is author of ADDENDA (Meow Press, 1998), ALEATORY ALLEGORIES (Salt Publishing, 2000), MEMORY CARDS AND ADOPTION PAPERS (Potes & Poets Press, 2001), And Then Something Happened (Salt Publishing, 2004), No Guns, No Durian (Tinfish Press, 2004), A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 2005), DEMENTIA BLOG (Singing Horse Press, 2008) and MEMORY CARDS: 2010-2011 SERIES (Singing Horse Press, 2011); and she edited The Tribe of John: Ashbery and Contemporary Poetry (University of Alabama Press, 1995). She edits Tinfish Press and teaches at the University of Hawai`i-Manoa.

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