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Zither & Autobiography
Series: Wesleyan Poetry Series
Sales Date: 2003-05-28
120 Pages, 5.50 x 8.50 in
A reflective, eclectic mixture of poetry and prose.
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."
LESLIE SCALAPINO is the author of many books, including New Time (Wesleyan, 1999) and The Public World, Syntactically Impermanence (Wesleyan, 1999).
""This is a radically new work, a narrative blast.""
~Fanny Howe, author of Indivisible and Selected Poems
""Scalapino's work stands out as one of the most serious, innovative, and challenging undertakings in contemporary poetry. Her practice of, and reflection on, narrative are breathtaking. These two texts together (from A to Z) perform a fascinating textual acrobatics.""
~Pierre Joris, author of Poasis
"This is a radically new work, a narrative blast."
~Fanny Howe, author of Indivisible and Selected Poems