If in Time: Selected Poems, 1975-2000

by Ann Lauterbach

Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most inventive and admired poets. Since the mid-1970s, she has explored the ways in which language simultaneously captures and forfeits our experience. By turns elegiac, fierce, and sensuous, her musically-charged poems subvert distinctions between narrative coherence and fragmentary elision, between outward attention and inward response. Throughout, Lauterbach questions the hope for personal agency within proliferating fields of cultural and historical event. If In Time brings together selections from each of her first five collections, as well as an exhilarating group of new poems.

Genres: Poetry

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2001

About the author

Born and raised in New York City, Ann Lauterbach studied at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Columbia University. Before completing her M.A. in English. she moved to London to work in publishing and art galleries. Upon her return to New York, she continued working in art galleries for a number of years. Lauterbach then began teaching writing and literature.

She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Foundation for the Arts, the Ingram Merrill Foundation, and in 1995, she was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship. Lauterbach has taught at Brooklyn College, Columbia, Iowa, Princeton, and at the City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center. She is currently Schwab Professor of Languages and Literature at Bard College, where she has also been, since 1991, co-chair of writing in the Milton Avery School of the Arts. She is also a visiting core critic at the Yale Graduate School of the Arts.

Reviews

[EIJANDOLUM]

“I predict your unborn sorrow.”

“Touch me here,
put your hand here where it hurts.”

“It looks like madness, an invitation
to impossible choices and unbearable nearness.”