Incarnate: Story Material

by Thalia Field

An enthralling new work by one of America's foremost experimental writers. Thalia Field's inventive new book explores the very condition of being how, invested with human form, we experience both suffering and ecstasy from childhood to adulthood to death. As with her previous book published by New Directions, Point and Line (2000), Incarnate defies it "industriously works the sparsely populated and as yet underdeveloped borderlands between poetry, fiction, theater, and contemporary classical music" ( Review of Contemporary Fiction ). In Story Material , she continues to reach beyond borders, examining how, trapped in our own stories, we act and react in a world of solidity, perceiving something "other" close at hand. With its amazing variety of poetic and prose-like forms, driven by a fierce and playful intelligence, Story Material challenges and moves us.

Genres: Poetry

126 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2004

About the author

Thalia Field was born in Chicago in 1966. After attending lycée in France, she graduated with honors from Brown University. She has three books of experimental writing/prose poetry published with New Directions: Point and Line (2000), Incarnate: Story Material (2004), and Bird Lovers, Backyard (2009). A novel, ULULU (Clown Shrapnel) was published by Coffee House Press in 2008. Field's writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Chicago Review, Ploughshares, Fence, Theater, Central Park, Chain, and Conjunctions, where she served as editor from 1995-1999. Before joining the faculty at Brown University, where she currently teaches experimental fiction and performance, Field taught at Bard College and at the Writing and Poetics program at Naropa University.

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

"Game Changer" :: not to be talking about Thalia Field (and Caponegro and Maso and and and but that's a different story isn't it) when you're talking about experimental and innovative and avant-garde and exploratory andandand wie auch immer you want to call it* (we all know what we're talking about really so don't be doing that do where you do the "whatever do these words mean?!?!" "it depends how you define....etc" as if you're not a mature enough human being with facility enough with language and how words work to handle just a little eentsy teensy tiny bit of ambiguity in the deployment of descriptors in a territory you just end up saying "but it's all just soooo suh-hub-jective" so stop being bothered by the use of words which, due to the phenomena themselves, cannot and never will be defined and delimited with the precision and conventionality with which the vocabulary of Chemistry is precision'd and delimited I mean it's just a part of being a mature language user to use words and its just the nature of words to articulate phenomena in a diversity of manners even all at once. It's really the very thing we do, reading fiction. So don't be surprised if a little of our fiction seeps into our talk about that same fiction it's kind of like the reverse of what happens in Critifiction "if you think about it".

At any rate, Thalia Field is your very own personal cutting edge.



* I call "it" capital=F Fiction and them I call capital=N Novels (or novel Novels) but you know that already. I mean, of course we're talking about the conventional Novel, not the 19th cent Realist** aberration.

** Realist Fiction -- not that there's anything wrong with that -- in it's place, it's corner, it's ecclesiastical season.

*** I know I know you want to hear about Thalia Field and not my hobbyhorses. Easy solution, read her ; you don't need my second hand comments.

[kirsten · Rating 4 out of 5]

Added 4th star for last piece "Zoologic"

[Kent · Rating 4 out of 5]

I appreciate poetry that touches on the language-deluge (the there-are-never-enough-words-to-really-make-a-poem strategy), but these poems seem to maintain any accessibility at too great a distance. It's as though they pride themselves on being able to stand so far away. Considering Point and Line and its more confident manipulation of meaning, it makes me wonder about what this book is really trying to accomplish. I know it's difficult to follow a truly original first book with something equally as original (my complaints about Mark Levine are similar), but considering the fancy forms that come in Point and Line, this book really just feels dull by comparison. Still interesting, but...

[Emmanuel · Rating 2 out of 5]

no access

[Marginalia2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thalia Field demands our attention by pushing the boundaries of conventional essays. While I liked some of her work—other pieces were too convoluted.