Description
Poetry. "Marjorie Becker's second collection of poems, PIANO GLASS/GLASS PIANO, is a truly remarkable achievement. Novelistic in its narrative conception and operatic in its dramatic sweep, this sequence of poems charts the oscillations of identity and sexuality, following the story of its speaker/narrator, Marnie, who is first seamstress then shopkeeper, and whore then Madam. Unspoken racial anxiety, the construction of Southern Jewish identity, the potential transformation of the self by use of the body—all of these are at stake and under discussion in Marnie's brilliantly interwoven stories.... Marnie is an extraordinary character, one of the most provocative and compelling female speakers in recent fiction or poetry.... Though the velvet sexual hammers within keep threatening to shatter the glass piano that is Marnie, the power of her endurance is that she remains held to its music, and to the songs of her own body and her own defiant dreams"—David St. John.
Author Bio
A native of Macon, Georgia, Marjorie Becker learned Spanish in childhood, studied in Spain, and served in the Peace Corps in rural Paraguay. She holds a doctorate from Yale and is the author of the price-winning Setting the Virgin on Fire, THE MACON SEX SCHOOL (Tebot Bach, 2020), the forthcoming Dancing on the Sun Stone: Mexican Women and the Gendered Politics of Octavio Paz, and two previous poetry collections, BODY BACH (Tebot bach, 2005) and PIANO GLASS/GLASS PIANO (Tebot Bach, 2010). She has won an array of awards including a Mellon Mentoring Award and a Faculty Fulbright Research Fellowship for Mexico. Her poems have appeared in many journals and anthropologies. She is Associate Professor of History and of English at the University of Southern California. She lives in Santa Monica.
Author City: SANTA MONICA, CA USA