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Wild Goods
Poetry. Here is a new collection of poems entitled WILD GOODS by Bay Area poet and translator Denise Newman. "The poems of WILD GOODS 'study' death as death being the same as actions/birth/the text/'her,' a 'sandwichtime.' The juncture or 'silent agreement' between these and being in the world is the inside and the outside making each 'their silent agreement/will eventually eat container too.' Oneself is turned outside rubbing; while being a silent middle. Pleasurably subtle, frightening, and exciting, in Newman's text one's daily manual labor is 'making a soft object of the world" -Leslie Scalapino.
- GenresPoetry
66 pages, Paperback
First published March 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
March 19, 2008
In Wild Goods, Denise Newman combines the grotesque and the sublime into a twisted romanticism – her paintings of family and landscape all dotted with things that leave them as uncomfortable pastorals, intentionally imperfect as the sculpture of Matissé.
Newman folds her poems, one into another. A jarring end line becomes a bold and sudden title – a surprising line break makes absolute sense in the dualism of its existence. She comments on parenting with a detachment from the thing itself, from the actual and the signatory. It is sexuality bound to the “other” that the self has already detached from.
These things exist below the immediate surface of Wild Goods, below its deliciously slow rhythm that begs the line forward, and the moments of sudden improvisation and reflection. Her lines begin as a lure, taking a narrative direction before stopping short, rethinking itself or breaking without apology. They are inventive, each carrying itself in a direction congruent with, or sometimes independent of, all the directions surrounding it.
The issues Newman delves into feed this discomforting balance: family and family preying on itself, nature and virginity contextualized by its dirtying and loss. Newman’s marriage of magical realism to Baudelaireian reality cuts a haunted landscape from the construction paper of memory and observation. She explores the failed promise of our own histories. Each poem in Made Flesh, for example, seems a postcard from the self and placed into a time capsule, all at once questioning the frailty of time.
Denise Newman's ear and wit are on full instrumental display as her practices her craft. War is the backdrop of Wild Goods – it’s incomplete refrain. War’s rejection as a white noise, as something omnipresent and totally unnecessary disarms and unqualifies its existence. It is another failed premise, failed tradition that Newman deftly weaves away.
Wild Goods seeks to balance the ideal and the actual, showing its impossibility. Idealism achieved, Plato tells us, is idealism no longer.
Newman folds her poems, one into another. A jarring end line becomes a bold and sudden title – a surprising line break makes absolute sense in the dualism of its existence. She comments on parenting with a detachment from the thing itself, from the actual and the signatory. It is sexuality bound to the “other” that the self has already detached from.
These things exist below the immediate surface of Wild Goods, below its deliciously slow rhythm that begs the line forward, and the moments of sudden improvisation and reflection. Her lines begin as a lure, taking a narrative direction before stopping short, rethinking itself or breaking without apology. They are inventive, each carrying itself in a direction congruent with, or sometimes independent of, all the directions surrounding it.
The issues Newman delves into feed this discomforting balance: family and family preying on itself, nature and virginity contextualized by its dirtying and loss. Newman’s marriage of magical realism to Baudelaireian reality cuts a haunted landscape from the construction paper of memory and observation. She explores the failed promise of our own histories. Each poem in Made Flesh, for example, seems a postcard from the self and placed into a time capsule, all at once questioning the frailty of time.
Denise Newman's ear and wit are on full instrumental display as her practices her craft. War is the backdrop of Wild Goods – it’s incomplete refrain. War’s rejection as a white noise, as something omnipresent and totally unnecessary disarms and unqualifies its existence. It is another failed premise, failed tradition that Newman deftly weaves away.
Wild Goods seeks to balance the ideal and the actual, showing its impossibility. Idealism achieved, Plato tells us, is idealism no longer.
Displaying 1 of 1 review