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Domain of Perfect Affection

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In Domain of Perfect Affection, Robin Becker explores the conditions under which we experience and resist in beauty salon, summer camp, beach, backyard, or museum; New York or New Mexico. “The Mosaic injunction against / the graven image” inspires meditations on drawings by Dürer, Evans, Klee, Marin, and del Sarto. To the consolations of art and human intimacy, Becker brings playfulness—“Worry stole the kayaks and soured the milk”—suffused with “Worry wraps her long legs / around me, promises to be mine forever.” In “The New Egypt,” the narrator mines her family’s “From my father I learned the dignity / of exile and the fire of acquisition, / not to live in places lightly, but to plant / the self like an orange tree in the desert.” Becker’s shapely stanzas—couplets, tercets, quatrains, pantoum, sonnet, syllabics—subvert her colloquial diction, creating a seamless merging of subject and form. Luminous, sensual, these poems offer sharp pleasures as they argue, elegize, mourn, praise, and sing.

91 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2006

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About the author

Robin Becker

29 books14 followers
Robin Becker (born 1951) is an American poet, critic, feminist, and professor.

Becker earned a BA and MA at Boston University. She taught for many years at the MIT before returning to Pennsylvania in 1994, where she is Liberal Arts Research Professor of English and Women's Studies at Penn State.

Becker is the author of seven collections of poetry, most recently, Tiger Heron and Domain of Perfect Affection. Her All American Girl won the 1996 Lambda Literary Award in Poetry. In 2000 she was honored with Penn State's George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching, and she served as Penn State Laureate in 2010-11. Other honours include fellowships from The Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies of the City University of New York, The William Steeple Davis Foundation, the Mary Bunting Institute of Radcliffe College, and the Massachusetts Artists Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Becker’s interest in narrative springs from her family background, including a childhood spent listening to her grandmother’s stories, learning from her the nuances of storytelling and her family’s history in Ukraine. Becker was also greatly influenced by the women writers whose poetry was available in the 1970s, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Maxine Kumin, Denise Levertov, and Susan Griffin. Poet Stephen Dunn regards Becker as achieving “what may be one of the early twenty first century’s most difficult accomplishments—to write a credible poetry of affirmation. In the doing, she doesn’t pretty up the world. Rather, she finds language that embraces our dualities, our many-selved presences, regularly demonstrating her kind of perfect affection.”

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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
Profile Image for Joanna.
387 reviews18 followers
September 8, 2010
From "Summer's Tale," Robin Becker asks "Who could chose one god among all the bright/feathers of August," and in a similar way it would be almost impossible for me to choose a favorite among the poems this book contains. "August" and "Head of an Angel" have endings that make you draw in a deep breath of quiet admiration, a little in awe of Becker's craftwork.

This is my favorite collection of Becker's poems since All-American Girl, which came out in the mid-nineties. Becker's voice in this collection is so mature, so astute, so remarkable in its candor and clarity.

The only way this book could be improved is if it were longer, if it set down even more poems that are such pleasure to read.

Profile Image for Barbara.
Author 2 books55 followers
April 3, 2012
I would give this book 3 and a half stars. But, that being said I don't really read much poetry. I like Haiku better. But I did enjoy some of the poems in this book as they relate to life.

My three favorites in the book are the poems called "August", "Description" and "Island of Daily Life".

One of the book groups I belong to picked this as their monthly read.
Profile Image for rinabeana.
384 reviews36 followers
March 31, 2012
Upon re-reading I'd give this 3.5 stars if I could. I quite liked some of the poems but the collection as a whole didn't really strike me as anything special.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews

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