What do you think?
Rate this book
Earth Room
Selected by Nobel Laureate Louise Glück as Winner of the inaugural Bergman Prize, Rachel Mannheimer’s debut, Earth Room, is a dazzling book-length narrative poem that explores with tenderness how art and love intersect to make one’s life. Transporting the reader across decades and from the Moon to Mars by way of Alaska, Berlin, and the Hudson Valley, Earth Room considers a lineage of sculpture, performance, and land art—from Robert Smithson to Pina Bausch—with observations shaped by gender and environment, history and portents of apocalypse. With an urgent, direct, and unmistakably powerful voice, Mannheimer tests the line between nature and culture, ordinary life and performance.
A work of sly wit and bracing sincerity, Earth Room is an original, unsparing book that Louise Glück calls “a lesson in how to make something of where we find ourselves.”
A work of sly wit and bracing sincerity, Earth Room is an original, unsparing book that Louise Glück calls “a lesson in how to make something of where we find ourselves.”
- GenresPoetry
82 pages, Paperback
Published April 1, 2022
4 people are currently reading
257 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
March 31, 2022
Poetry, appropriately, about scale and time and influence. Rachel Mannheimer writes rather matter-of-factly. Her style is reminiscent of memoir the way it studies passion and organizes life under common headings. Earth Room studies setting - the context and space that wraps our memories to match - in love and life. Profusely mature.
March 30, 2022
Mannheimer writes with unassuming poise in this poetry volume that often dips into creative prose reflecting on performance, visual artwork, and converging narratives of absence. It is bookended by "T H E M O O N" and "M A R S," two pieces that emphasize generational anxieties about the possibility for continued life on Earth. The volume is organized by place, with each poem being named after a general location. Many poems share the same title (and location), provoking consideration for the variety of stories that contribute to a multi-dimensional understanding of how our bodies become stitched to the landscape. Perhaps this helps to explain Mannheimer's interest in physical art projects that ask the viewer to locate themselves in relation to an object (or place themselves within a room, like the titular "Earth Room" installation).
Occasionally, Mannheimer explicitly invites the reader to recognize her identity as a Jewish author, which adds additional scale to the text's rendered archive of decay. The second-to-last rendition of "G E R M A N T O W N" opens with a simple claim, that "Sculpture is most pleasing at a human scale." A couple stanzas later, Donald Judd is quoted in a reading of Robert Morris' art: "Morris's pieces exist after all, as meager as they are. / Things that exist exist, and everything is on their side. They're here, / which is pretty puzzling" (68). Mannheimer instills a bitterness to Judd's appraisal, transforming his affirmation of creative expression into recognition of modernity, and perhaps presence itself, as articulations of felt extinction. And yet, the artist continues to draw in the sand, remarking on our collective, confounding lot. And we continue to look beyond the stars for something that cannot be named, for reasons to persist within instability.
Occasionally, Mannheimer explicitly invites the reader to recognize her identity as a Jewish author, which adds additional scale to the text's rendered archive of decay. The second-to-last rendition of "G E R M A N T O W N" opens with a simple claim, that "Sculpture is most pleasing at a human scale." A couple stanzas later, Donald Judd is quoted in a reading of Robert Morris' art: "Morris's pieces exist after all, as meager as they are. / Things that exist exist, and everything is on their side. They're here, / which is pretty puzzling" (68). Mannheimer instills a bitterness to Judd's appraisal, transforming his affirmation of creative expression into recognition of modernity, and perhaps presence itself, as articulations of felt extinction. And yet, the artist continues to draw in the sand, remarking on our collective, confounding lot. And we continue to look beyond the stars for something that cannot be named, for reasons to persist within instability.
May 21, 2022
Super fascinating book, inspired me to write in a similar way for a project I've been conceptualizing for a while now. Essentially a book-length essay in poems? It's difficult to ascribe a particular style or genre for this book since it moves so fluidly through prose and poetry, often obfuscating lines that divide the two. A book about cities, memory, art and its theories, Jewish diaspora, & so much more. Feeling calmer and wiser after reading and a rediscovered, soothing angryhope.
October 3, 2022
The power creeps up on you in this tonally stable, research-based collection. When the personal enters, it’s after the fact, downplayed, surprisingly devastating. The impact here is in reference, suggestion, juxtaposition
October 21, 2022
loved this collection -- easily my new favorite. her prose was lovely and approachable. i loved the way she wrote about art and companionship -- can't wait to revisit the book again!
March 19, 2022
Funny, moving, and thought provoking. Love it so much.
April 21, 2022
Remarkably insightful, assured, and occasionally devastating. This book has so much to say about so many things, including the arts and their intersection with our most intimate lives. What a privilege to read this.
January 20, 2025
I liked her poems in the most recent issue of The Paris Review, and I found this book today in the used bookstore. I didn't know much about Mannheimer, but the poetry is wonderful, tender, human. Imagine my surprise and delight: she grew up in Anchorage, and writes about places I've known all my life.
February 7, 2023
Poems about Rainer and Judd and Smithson and Noguchi and love and nature.
Hit me like a ton of bricks
Hit me like a ton of bricks
January 18, 2024
Masterful novella-length poem cycle that flits from explorations of land art, relationships, political history, avant garde dance, and lots more.
March 3, 2024
This really put me into my place somehow
April 24, 2025
affective means of engagement with performance extends the liveness of the original happenings
December 26, 2025
i found this short book in mia’s room. it’s labeled a poem, often reads like scraps from the journal of a clever and ironic poet who thinks a lot about performance art (and, of course, love and loss). i liked it.
“Everywhere,
people whose judgment I trusted
were having kids.”
“The story I took
from Sunday school was this:
God created the world, God parted the Red Sea,
and after the Holocaust, the British had some land no one was using so they gave it to the Jews as a home.”
“Everywhere,
people whose judgment I trusted
were having kids.”
“The story I took
from Sunday school was this:
God created the world, God parted the Red Sea,
and after the Holocaust, the British had some land no one was using so they gave it to the Jews as a home.”
September 29, 2023
Beacon
As I descended the stairs of the overpass,
glassed-in and greenhouse-hot, to access the platform
where I'd wait for the train, I saw the cars
parked in the lot behind me, reflected in the glass
through which I looked out at the river, so that
the cars were—all of them—submerged
below the water's surface, wavering.
Often, Chris woke screaming.
That night, he saw my ghost
in the corner of our room.
He called out my name
and since I was—in waking life—
alive, I answered him. (28)
As I descended the stairs of the overpass,
glassed-in and greenhouse-hot, to access the platform
where I'd wait for the train, I saw the cars
parked in the lot behind me, reflected in the glass
through which I looked out at the river, so that
the cars were—all of them—submerged
below the water's surface, wavering.
Often, Chris woke screaming.
That night, he saw my ghost
in the corner of our room.
He called out my name
and since I was—in waking life—
alive, I answered him. (28)
Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews