Counting

by Jayne Anne Phillips

One of 26 hardcover copies out of a total of 500. Signed by Phillips.

Paperback

First published June 1, 1978

About the author

JAYNE ANNE PHILLIPS is the author of Black Tickets, Machine Dreams, Fast Lanes, Shelter, MotherKind, Lark and Termite, and Quiet Dell. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Bunting Fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships. Winner of an Arts and Letters Award and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she was inducted into the Academy in 2018. A National Book Award finalist, and twice a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, she lives in New York and Boston.

Reviews

[Zarah Butcher-McGunnigle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is this prose? Poetry? Prose poetry? Poetic prose? I'm going to go with poetic prose. There’s a strong sense of narrative— two people in a doomed relationship. There’s a particular rhythm to the sentences which I find engaging....there are lots of simple sentences, and compound sentences are rare. ‘And’ does not appear very often. This creates urgency. It also creates a kind of flatness, and makes the sentences seem more paratactic. Flat, but honest and forthright. The writing makes me think of those pictures we used to make in primary school, where you cover a page with colourful crayon shapes, and then cover that with a certain type of black paint and then scratch away the black to make a picture. (The colour is the poetry and the blackness is the prose?) Phillips uses sentence fragments a lot and these give the writing a poetic quality: “Driver’s hand open beside her face.” “Shadowed grey, sides of oxen.” “Ate supper by the light of the streets. Boiled potatoes, no cheese.” The fragments also contribute to the etched crayon art quality— the important details have been revealed—it is not necessary to have a complete, grammatically correct sentences all the time. The fragments are evocative.