Waterwork

by Sarah Riggs

Poetry. "In five stunning sequences, Sarah Riggs has created a poetics of elastic migrations that imagines the world as clusters, skeins, and motions whose innate peril is miraculously saved in hte act of 'each name for a thing seems intent to curl from its shelled meaning.' Places, histories, persons, myth and object, intimacy and incident, are precision shorelines of simultaneous apprehension and erasure. In this subtle and luminous first book, Sarah Riggs has engaged our most fundamental quandaries in a poetry that announces, in Stevens' phrase, 'a new knowledge of reality.'"--Ann Lauterbach. "[Riggs] turns her acute eye to contemporary culture as well as natural history and her ear to the subtle balances of rhythm and assonance. The result is a beautiful attention that illuminates nuance, making the everyday world more detailed and thus more grand"--Cole Swensen.

80 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

Sarah Riggs is the author of five books of poetry in English: Waterwork (2007), Chain of Minuscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (2007), 60 Textos (2010), Autobiography of Envelopes (2012), and Pomme & Granite (2015). She has translated and co-translated six books of contemporary French poetry into English, including most recently Oscarine Bosquet’s Present Participle and Etel Adnan’s Time. Sarah Riggs lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Reviews

[Taylor Franson-Thiel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rigg’s new book “Lines” isn’t on Goodreads (which is what I actually read but I want the book to count for my yearly tracker) so this review is for “Lines” not this one. I’ll fix this once it gets up on Goodreads