Poetry. Marjorie Welish, the esteemed poet who selected Michelle Taransky's manuscript for the Omnidawn prize, explains that these poems "animate the economies and concerns of our lives. BARN BURNED, THEN implicates Objectivism in this imagining, to create poems of the conglomerate of bank and barn—words shown to be made of contingent cultural forces." In terse, tautly crafted poems that are dynamically contemporary, Taranksy assesses our cultural moment with unrelenting courage and candor.
Author City: PHILADELPHIA, PA USA
Michelle Taransky received a BA from the University of Chicago and an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. With her father, architect Richard Taransky, she is the coauthor of The Plans Caution (QUEUE Books, 2007). Her poems have appeared in publications including DENVER QUARTERLY, VOLT, How2 and New American Writing. She currently lives in Philadelphia, where she works at Kelly Writers House and teaches poetry at Temple University.
Reviews and Other Links
author blog
Interviewed by Sarah Louise Green
author page @ PennSound
John Mingay in Stride Magazine
Seth Abramson @ The Huffington Post
“Michelle Taransky’s BARN BURNED, THEN explores the hidden economies of a derelict American dream. In this ingeniously unified and mercilessly fractured collection of poems, the barn and the bank—those fundamental repositories of value—become sites for an elegiac meditation on signification itself. What is a barn? ‘A windowless address / put up to the shadow-maker.’ What is a bank? ‘A way to get more for less.’ With uncanny foresight, this postmodern Cassandra’s lyrical utterance warn us about the Ponzi scheme of modernity, while simultaneously ‘taking care // Of our ailing want / To piece back together // All that has parted.’”
—Srikanth Reddy
“Michelle Taransky takes her title from Masahide's 17th century haiku: ‘Barn's burnt down— / now / I can see the moon.’ There, physical loss is a gateway to an ecstatic gain of focus. Here, barns still burn, but the haze that hovers over the disappeared structures is more fiscal than physical: banks, not lightning or arson, would seem to be the (in)efficient causes. In two interlocked series, ‘Burn Book’ and ‘Bank Book,’ Taransky uses her fluency in frame-scanning, collage, and abstraction to alert readers to the depth of tinder we live amid.”
—Bob Perelman