Description
Poetry. ZITHER & AUTOBIOGRAPHY is comprised of two parts: the author's autobiography and a book-length poem entitled ZITHER Both parts of the book are concerned with facts and their undoing. In AUTOBIOGRAPHY, Scalapino explores her shifting memories of childhood--especially of years spent in Asia--experimenting with the memoir form to explore how a view of one's own life develops, how "fixed memories move as illusion." ZITHER opens with a unique narrative that the author describes as "samurai film as Classic Comic of Shakespeare's King Lear (without using any of Shakespeare's language, characters, or plot)." Creating a complex spatial soundscape, the poem works formally to allow continual change of one's conceptions while reading. The juxtaposition of the two parts and the connection between them is "the anarchist moment...disjunction itself," a key concept in much of Scalapino's work. This vivid book reveals in every thought-sparking section just why Scalapino has been hailed by Library Journal as "one of the most unique and powerful writers at the forefront of American literature."
Author Bio
Leslie Scalapino (1947-2010) is the author of thirty books of poetry, prose, inter-genre-fiction, plays, and essays, including a collaboration with artist Kiki Smith, The Animal is in the World like Water in Water (Granary Books, 2010); It's go in horizontal/Selected Poems, 1974-2006 (University of California Press at Berkeley, 2008); Day Ocean State of Stars' Night (Green Integer, 2007); Zither and Autobiography (Wesleyan University Press, 2003); It's Go In/ Quiet illumined Grass/ Lands (The Post-Apollo Press, 2002); a collaboration with the artist Marina Adams, The Tango (Granary Books, 2001); ORCHID JETSUM (Tuumba, 2001); and SIGHT (Edge Books, 1999), a collaboration with the poet Lyn Hejinian. Her long poem way (North Point Press, 1988) won the Poetry Center Award, the Lawrence Lipton Prize, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Scalapino taught at the Naropa Institute, Bard College, Mills College, and UC San Diego. She was the editor and founder of O Books.
Author City: OAKLAND, CA USA