Jane Joritz-Nakagawa’s Meditations beautifully combine the inward focus of reflection with the leaps and breakages of contemporary urban life — a life in which meditative stillness is elusive, if not impossible. At the meeting-point of real-world politics and poetic internality, The Meditations jump-cut between the rhetorics of capitalism and constant war (“as if the weapons were moving // entirely in the wrong direction”) and hard-won lyric flight (“horses laugh // and clouds put on their aprons”). Throughout, Joritz-Nakagawa plays with line-breaks and white space, with orthography and diacritical marks — all of which syncopate syntax and hint at the manifold meanings hidden in phonemes. Like tesserae, her words and lines create — through fragments —exquisite patterns. These are poems that “enter the language partial / and come out / whole.”
—Elisabeth A. Frost
Details
- Publication Date
- Aug 4, 2009
- Language
- English
- Category
- Poetry
- Copyright
- All Rights Reserved - Standard Copyright License
- Contributors
- By (author): Jane Joritz-Nakagawa
Specifications
- Pages
- 80
- Binding
- Perfect Bound
- Interior Color
- Black & White
- Dimensions
- US Trade (6 x 9 in / 152 x 229 mm)