Present Tense, Anna Rabinowitz

Present Tense

Anna Rabinowitz

Publisher: Omnidawn Publishing
PubDate: 9/1/2010
ISBN: 9781890650452
Binding: PAPERBACK
Price: $14.95
Quantity Available: 69
Pages: 96
 

Poetry. PRESENT TENSE is a tour de force, a book-length poetic project that is anatomy, history, testimony, eulogy, and divining rod of our constantly evolving present. In four acts, Rabinowitz dramatizes not only our various socio-religious-political ecosystems but also the myriad echoes of those systems that resound in our psyches and permeate our thoughts. Through dialogue, reportage, Biblical reference, interview, famous speech, infamous cultural and historical events and more, Rabinowitz offers readers an arresting account of who and what we are as humans—in all of our darkness and our brilliance. This poetry—with its invigorating breadth and shocking immediacy—compels its readers' full engagement with the page, an interaction that incites us to examine our own position and potential in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of the actual, as we experience it moment by moment.

Author City: NEW YORK, NY USA

Anna Rabinowitz has published four books of poetry: PRESENT TENSE (Omnidawn, 2010), THE WANTON SUBLIME: A FLORILEGIUM OF WHETHERS AND WONDERS (Tupelo Press, 2006), DARKLING (Tupelo Press, 2001) (which will be translated into German and published by Luxbooks, Wiesbaden, Germany in 2011), and At the Site of Inside Out (University of Massachusetts Press, 1997). DARKLING was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine's Best Poetry Book of 2001 Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2002, and At the Site of Inside Out was a winner of the Juniper Prize. American Opera Projects transformed DARKLING into an experimental opera-theatre work that blurs distinctions between poetry, theater, and music. This production had its world premiere to great critical acclaim on February 26, 2006 at the 13th St. Theatre, NYC. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2001, Anna Rabinowitz has published widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, Verse, and Doubletake. Her work has also been reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, The KGB Bar Reader, The Poets' Grimm, Poetry Daily, and Poetry After 9/11.

Reviews and Other Links
author site
Publishers Weekly
"Primer" @ Poetry Daily
Renee Emerson @ NewPages
One of Anis Shivani's 17 Most Important Poetry Books of Fall 2010 @ The Huffington Post
Glenda Burgess @ Gently Read Literature




“The relation of time to violence constitutes the central question of this piercing work. Using a wide range of voices and various forms, from litany to quotation to dialogue to nursery rhyme, Rabinowitz tries to occupy the present as a kind of prayer that could disengage the hurtling fall of time and disarm its inevitable news. It is news we recognize, and while her goal is impossible, the beauty of the attempt is deeply moving.”
—Cole Swensen

“Anna Rabinowitz’s PRESENT TENSE is packed with urgent questions about morality, mortality and god. Through anaphora, acrostics, interviews, letters to famous figures, postcard questionnaires, counterintelligence interrogation manuals and contorted nursery rhymes (to name just a few of Rabinowitz’s inventive strategies), she summons up a past where ‘god was a ravenous god / a mouth before words,’ and a present in which ‘Hearts blacken in unblossoming.’ It’s a fierce and unflinching reckoning.”
—Matthea Harvey

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