Description
Poetry. A survey of the life's work of one of America's most original avant-garde poets and playwrights.
"Rochelle Owens's writing is sui generis, brilliantly inventive, immensely learned, sophisticated, and witty in its conceits. She is, in many ways, a proto-language poet, her marked ellipses, syntactic oddities, and dense and clashing verbal surfaces. Hers is a universe of stark gesture, lightning flash, and judgment, a poetic microstructure in its superb modulations of rhythms and internal rhymes, its ironies and paradoxes. In its uncompromising savagery, its passionate rejection of sentimentality, Owens's lyric voice is unique among contemporary poets. An astonishing body of work."—Marjorie Perloff
Author Bio
A central figure in the international avant-garde for fifty years, Rochelle Owens is a poet, playwright, translator, and video artist. She has published seventeen books of poetry including HERMAPHROPOETICS, DRIFTING GEOMETRIES (Singing Horse Press, 2017), OUT OF UR: NEW & SELECTED POEMS 1961-2012 (Shearsman Books, 2013), SOLITARY WORKWOMAN (Junction Press, 2011), and LUCA: DISCOURSE ON LIFE AND DEATH (Junction Press, 2001). She is the author of four collections of plays and also edited Spontaneous Combustion: Eight New American Plays. She translated Liliane Atlan's The Passersby. Owens has been a recipient of five Village Voice Obie awards and Honors from the New York Drama Critics Circle. A pioneer in the American experimental theatre, her plays have been presented at Le Festival d'Avignon and the Berlin Theatre Festival. She is widely known as one of the most innovative and controversial writers of this century, whose groundbreaking work has influenced subsequent experimental poets and playwrights.
Author City: PHILADELPHIA, PA USA