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The Cosmopolitan
A National Poetry Series winner, chosen by John Yau
These poems spin tales of traveling in a world both romantic and politicized, a world miniaturized by globalization and haunted by the figure of the cosmopolitan, who is aware of its saturated history, yet inspired by the knowledge that nostalgia is merely “memory decayed to sugar.” In the kingdom of Donna Stonecipher’s imagination, “a story is always forming to adorn reality,” and the fall of the Eastern bloc is reenacted the night “the girl with the DDR bag met the boy with the CCCP T-shirt.”
Donna Stonecipher is the author of The Reservoir and Souvenir de Constantinople. She grew up in Seattle and Tehran and makes her home both here and abroad.
These poems spin tales of traveling in a world both romantic and politicized, a world miniaturized by globalization and haunted by the figure of the cosmopolitan, who is aware of its saturated history, yet inspired by the knowledge that nostalgia is merely “memory decayed to sugar.” In the kingdom of Donna Stonecipher’s imagination, “a story is always forming to adorn reality,” and the fall of the Eastern bloc is reenacted the night “the girl with the DDR bag met the boy with the CCCP T-shirt.”
Donna Stonecipher is the author of The Reservoir and Souvenir de Constantinople. She grew up in Seattle and Tehran and makes her home both here and abroad.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 30, 2009
Donna Stonecipher is the poet of accrual. I feel like this is what comes up with her style, both in this book, and The Reservoir, her prose blocks make a statement about how I, as a reader, am made to understand things. But with The Cosmopolitan, she takes it one step further by investigating how a person forms these parts about his life that he thinks are solid, and significant for defining himself, even as they turn out to be so ephemeral. The main trope here is travel. Stonecipher turns these things over and over trying to figure out what is really gained by travel. People are so certain they are made something new, and yet that conclusion is complicated, as one has to wonder what exactly that thing is that we gained. Is it simply the romance we lend to travel that we find so appealing.
January 11, 2009
Donna Stonecipher’s poems are a collage of experience. The poet takes in everything—from what she was reading at the time a poem was built to people and circumstances she has seen—and The Cosmopolitan includes poems (or “inlays,” as Stonecipher calls them) inspired by our generation’s “relationship to quotation and collage.” The inlays are as deliberate as the concepts they are inspired from. The ideas of this collection are interesting and complex, and the poet’s sentences contain glorious images and ideas.
How can the reader not swoon over the ending to “Inlay 4 (Susan Sontag)”:
It was like being in a silent film – we had to wait for the intertitles, which took forever to translate a little of the profusion in our heads into phrases. Pity we who must corset our mental splendor into the whalebone of grammar, which laces us up so tight we have to remove rib to breathe.
The poet winks at the concept of meaning, the concept of translation. What are we spending time on when we weave together images and ideas and words, all of them separated by the white space of silence or the white space of the page? These inlays dangle the lock and key of language and circumstance. It’s too bad Stonecipher stays so rigid in her corset; to see her let down the hair of her writing would have been just as exciting as tracing its form.
With nostalgia “a memory decayed to sugar,” Stonecipher shows her teeth in these poems. The Cosmopolitan takes on the world by circling it with a deliberate swagger. You will find no extravagance in this collection, though the extravagance of others will be noted and pinned to the gold frames of mirrors. Stonecipher’s sentences are finely chiseled. If the reader can let down their own hair and loosen their grip on reality, the language will lure in even the most confused or bewildered.
This collection of work is pieced together, planned, and operates both inside and outside of poetry’s grid. Knowledge is collected, processed, and spread along like a farmer’s seeds in neat rows that hide something potentially wild.
Review by Lisa Bower
How can the reader not swoon over the ending to “Inlay 4 (Susan Sontag)”:
It was like being in a silent film – we had to wait for the intertitles, which took forever to translate a little of the profusion in our heads into phrases. Pity we who must corset our mental splendor into the whalebone of grammar, which laces us up so tight we have to remove rib to breathe.
The poet winks at the concept of meaning, the concept of translation. What are we spending time on when we weave together images and ideas and words, all of them separated by the white space of silence or the white space of the page? These inlays dangle the lock and key of language and circumstance. It’s too bad Stonecipher stays so rigid in her corset; to see her let down the hair of her writing would have been just as exciting as tracing its form.
With nostalgia “a memory decayed to sugar,” Stonecipher shows her teeth in these poems. The Cosmopolitan takes on the world by circling it with a deliberate swagger. You will find no extravagance in this collection, though the extravagance of others will be noted and pinned to the gold frames of mirrors. Stonecipher’s sentences are finely chiseled. If the reader can let down their own hair and loosen their grip on reality, the language will lure in even the most confused or bewildered.
This collection of work is pieced together, planned, and operates both inside and outside of poetry’s grid. Knowledge is collected, processed, and spread along like a farmer’s seeds in neat rows that hide something potentially wild.
Review by Lisa Bower
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June 30, 2009Fun little paradox rooms about the adventures of flaneurs. An interesting inversion takes place by the end of this book: what seemed like the jaded wisdom of seasoned travelers begins to look more like the romantic notions of amateurs; quirks that seemed utterly cosmopolitan begin to look provincial. Cosmopolitans are, in a way, the ultimate provincials. It's hard to tell how much this is a joke of Stonecipher's making. . . Still, an enjoyable and interesting read, with lots of great lines.
Read
January 26, 2009i am really taken with the book’s form—its numbered sections and “inlays”—and loved the sudden communications among sections—they feel illuminated.
July 12, 2020
I love the format of this book (and Model City) with its poetic building blocks that slow the reading for the sake of savouring and meditation. The internal stitches of thread that link, embroider and suggest connections are often beautiful and support many of the koan-like philosophical nudges, though the pleasure wanes a bit when they come to be expected, certain twists feeling a little familiar within the repetitive style. But the pleasure of single lines is rich relish, sufficient.
April 6, 2020
I love Stonecipher's work, and am incredibly excited for the current project she's working on. Going back to the Cosmopolitan was a delightful re-entry into a past world.
Her way with language is enchanting, disarming, and full of jabs.
Her way with language is enchanting, disarming, and full of jabs.
June 2, 2021
"He gave her a recycled dragonfly."
Obsessed with this collection of 22 poems, each with 8-12 part sequences. Tiny prose poems covering travel and memory and contradiction and doubling and mirror-imaging. What a whirl.
"She kept one peacock feather in a drawer."
Obsessed with this collection of 22 poems, each with 8-12 part sequences. Tiny prose poems covering travel and memory and contradiction and doubling and mirror-imaging. What a whirl.
"She kept one peacock feather in a drawer."
December 6, 2008
I saw her read recently at Emory and she was great, so I bought her book. In these poems, she is constantly crossing her own paths, but while the circularity may feel neatly conclusive, it is anything but. These poems open up into mere labels, as a child in play, (and certainly with the same playful spirit, wit, and humor) but they also reveal the surfaces of words as interchangeable oddities.
"She wrote, I want to be seen through. He wrote, But you are deliberately opaque"
Her concerns resonate very much with mine, the "real" versus the ideal/idea/perception/conception of the thing, the displacement of spaces but the containment of personal selves, the passage of time and our perception of the passage of time, language, architecture, etc.
"What was going to get the snow angels--but snow itself?"
Yet she does so without sounding lofty, philosophical, or overly theoretical. The thing that makes this collection is the joy she puts in words, and the wonder. There is a lot of wonder here. And humor.
"We didn't know who the joke was on, but what WAS certain was that we would be among the laughing."
Taken out of context, some of her lines could be mis-construed as overly clever, but she's immune from that because these poems are not self-satisfied with mere cleverness. They play with clever phrasings, but at the same time, they are distrustful of them.
This is definitely one of the best collections of poetry I've read recently.
"She wrote, I want to be seen through. He wrote, But you are deliberately opaque"
Her concerns resonate very much with mine, the "real" versus the ideal/idea/perception/conception of the thing, the displacement of spaces but the containment of personal selves, the passage of time and our perception of the passage of time, language, architecture, etc.
"What was going to get the snow angels--but snow itself?"
Yet she does so without sounding lofty, philosophical, or overly theoretical. The thing that makes this collection is the joy she puts in words, and the wonder. There is a lot of wonder here. And humor.
"We didn't know who the joke was on, but what WAS certain was that we would be among the laughing."
Taken out of context, some of her lines could be mis-construed as overly clever, but she's immune from that because these poems are not self-satisfied with mere cleverness. They play with clever phrasings, but at the same time, they are distrustful of them.
This is definitely one of the best collections of poetry I've read recently.
December 7, 2009
Maybe I should have liked this more. It was tight for sure. Tight and cool and it broke when it needed to break and it got wispy and floated and then it tightened up again and delivered. Delivery is big here. Maybe I'm not being fair because I haven't read this type of poetry in a while. The text felt so separate. It was it's own little engine and I was merely the reader. I didn't ride on the poems and or get inside them. I kept the proper distance and did what I was supposed to do. I guess what I'm saying is: I could have been reading an interesting, well-written article but instead I read these poems.
June 11, 2010
I loved this -- I love the form, prose poems in sections with quotes from what she's reading "inlayed" in the middle. A travelogue of sorts, but full of its own self-critique, awareness, politics without being obnoxious, cataloging exoticism without seeming opportunistic/overly privileged. No small feat! I say.
"Which would you rather your head be full of, facts or ideas? (Clouds, riposted the cosmopolitan.) Facts are finite, said the dreamer. Ideas reproduce exponentially, said the monkey. But inside every fact is an idea, said the beautiful girl. But inside every idea is a beautiful girl, said the man in a brown study."
"Which would you rather your head be full of, facts or ideas? (Clouds, riposted the cosmopolitan.) Facts are finite, said the dreamer. Ideas reproduce exponentially, said the monkey. But inside every fact is an idea, said the beautiful girl. But inside every idea is a beautiful girl, said the man in a brown study."
September 21, 2018
Donna Stonecipher is an incredible poet. This collection was the first I read by her and it immediately placed her among my favorite poets. She has a gift for observation that is matched only by the keenness of her intellect and her imagination. Read Stonecipher not just to understand the world you know, but to learn about the world you don't.
February 16, 2009
This is a beautiful book, Stonecipher's best so far, filled with wisdom about how we belong to space and time and our desire to escape from the limitations and accidents of our place of time of birth. What a wonderful collection of prose poems.
Want to read
December 12, 2008Donna's work speaks for itself--beautiful, smart; it arabesques through the world to which it is so open, that comes tumbling through it into your lap wet with your unshed tears. I can't wait to read this new--and National Poetry Series winning--book!
March 19, 2009
Reads like a newspaper serial, with a breather here and there.
Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews