F2F

by Janet Holmes

f2f : Shorthand for "face-to-face," as in meeting someone in real life, flesh-to-flesh, as opposed to in the electronic world of cyberspace. Used in chat rooms and while instant messaging on the Internet. At the core of this challenging new collection from Janet Holmes is the conceit of the sense of sight and the complex role it plays in women's self-identities and relationships. Emily Dickinson is introduced as the iconic female writer who, unread in her time, is frequently misinterpreted and unheard. Holmes relates Dickinson's self-isolation to the writer's isolation from the reader and the intimacy of the act of reading. Echo, Eurydice, and Eros―other "E" figures, these mythological, their stories relying on seeing and being seen―are related by Holmes to twentieth-century counterparts manifesting as an anorexic, a flamboyant dresser, and a love god, respectively. Holmes intersperses her meditation with the language of online text-messaging, employing it as a vehicle for probing the dual limitations and liberties afforded on-line correspondents. Through her correspondents' postings, we chart their relationship evolving without benefit of ever meeting or exchanging photographs, the participants deeply affected by the absence of the sense of sight. By turns provocative and timid, lyrical and terse, the voices in f2f exhibit myriad human reactions to how seeing each other influences how we behave.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2006

About the author

Janet Holmes is an award-winning poet and author of four books of poetry: F2F; Humanophone; The Green Tuxedo; and The Physicist at the Mall. Her awards include grants from the Idaho Commission on the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the Loft-McKnight Foundation, the Jerome Foundation, and the Minnesota Arts Board; the Minnesota Book Award, the Foreword Magazine Poetry Book of the Year award, the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, the Pablo Neruda Award, and two inclusions in the Best American Poetry series; and fellowships from Yaddo, MacDowell, the Fondation Ledig-Rowholt (Switzerland), and Fundación Valparaíso (Spain). Since 1999 she has served as director and editor of Ahsahta Press, an all-poetry literary nonprofit press based at Boise State University, where she teaches in the MFA Program for Creative Writing.

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was reading this on the bus when I was going to the doctor's this week; rush hour time but going the opposite way, so there were only 3 people on the bus the whole time. This guy gets on and there is all this room, so naturally enough, he has to sit right next to me. He keeps lifting up his hand and hovering it above his lap, and I keep thinking, I hope he doesn't start feeling himself, cause I may have to move. And he keeps turning his body way around as if he is looking at me, but he may be looking out the window. So instead of moving, I kind of use the book as armor, holding it up between us so I don't have to feel his weird erratic energy, ironically, keeping up from being face to face. Thanks Janet!

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Holmes updates the Greeks for the MySpace generation, figuring Orpheus as a rock star, Eros and Psyche as IM buddies, and Narcissus as maybe the prototypical MySpace junkie, getting back distorted echoes of the idealized self he’s anxious to project. The fun's in the way she finds analogues for our "new" online social interactions (like this one) in ancient myths of thwarted desire, which invites the thought that virtuality may just be imagination with its ballcap turned askew.