Quipu

by Arthur Sze

Sze's poetry is bold and versatile and brings together "disparate realms of experience." -The New Yorker

Genres: Poetry

98 pages, Kindle Edition

First published September 1, 2005

About the author

Arthur Sze (b. 1950 New York City) is a second-generation Chinese American poet.

Sze was educated at the University of California, Berkeley, and is the author of eight books of poetry. His own poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Conjunctions, The Kenyon Review, Manoa, The Paris Review, Field, The New Yorker, and Virginia Quarterly Review, and have been translated into Albanian, Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Romanian, and Turkish.

He was a Visiting Hurst Professor at Washington University, a Doenges Visiting Artist at Mary Baldwin College, and has conducted residencies at Brown University, Bard College, and Naropa University. He is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the first poet laureate of Santa Fe.

He is the recipient of a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, an American Book Award, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, two National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing fellowships, a George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation Fellowship, three grants from the Witter Bynner Foundation for Poetry, and a Western States Book Award for Translation.

Reviews

[Autumn Azure · Rating 5 out of 5]

Such a beautiful and complex poet. Sze incorporates everything of the universe and finds a way to not only parallel them, but do it in such a way that forces the reader to rethink their own ideas of the aesthetic and the world. I would recommend this collection for anyone, even if you're not interested in poetry.

[Jerry Yudelson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Challenging, deeply scientific, yet mythological poetry. Rewards careful reading & savoring each poem before moving to the next.

[Micah Winters · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sze's poetics to me feels as ancient as it does postmodern. What can at first strike the reader as perplexing complexity, and even randomness, reliably spools out into a spirit of deeply meditative attention, and the links become felt, intuited -- even if at a level below articulation. This collection is a broadly successful one -- a quipu being a perfectly-selected unifying image -- and "The Angle of Reflection Equals the Angle of Incidence" contains the *most apt* description of what Sze's poems insist upon, gently but persistently: "these have no through-line except that all // things becoming and unbecoming become part / of the floe." So, so good. The closing lines of the same poem double down, gorgeously: "And as a lantern undulating on the surface // of a black pool is not the lantern itself, / so these synapsed words are not the things // themselves, but, sizzling, point the way."

[Xinyan Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

mystic; i think my favourite poem is "spring smoke."

a bit hard to decipher at times but that is probably a skill issue on my part. sometimes i felt the colour phrases were repetitive

i loved the unconventional uses of nouns as verbs !

[Dail Williams · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Sze’s poetry feels like a fever dream on a rollercoaster 🎢✨

[Roxanne]

You know what, I give up on this. I've been reading it on and off for like a year and a half, and while it has some nice moments, it has never really caught me. I've admired Sze's work in some anthologies - I don't know if it's a whole book of him that's problematic for me, or whether it's this book. Either way, I think this going in the donate/sell bin. Despite it having a completely awesome cover.

[Mike Good · Rating 5 out of 5]

fantastic

[hh · Rating 3 out of 5]

exactly the sort of book i might revise my opinion on after a few reads. i'm interested but not catching something. highly associative for all its narrative appearances.

[Christine Granados · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems I could understand I enjoyed.