Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes

by Genine Lentine

Genine Lentine's new chapbook, a finalist in the NMP/DIAGRAM 2009 chapbook contest, is a great debut. "Reading Genine Lentine's poems--so ardent and playful, risky and affecting--I kept thinking that it's not true, what Ren Char once said, that 'no bird has the heart to sing in a thicket of questions.' These poems plunge headlong into uncertainties of both language and life and, in doing so, they are so original that I often felt while reading them that I was in the grip of a brand new and still unnamed emotion." --Richard McCann "These clear, refreshing acts of attention seem to wake us to another way of seeing, and to the problems and pleasures of saying what we see. Have we taken the act of speech for granted all along? In her short, formally inventive pieces--and especially in her dazzling long poem about language's power and limits that anchors this collection--Lentine sounds like no one else. Her wry, astonished, aching voice is a fresh presence in American poetry." --Mark Doty "Beautiful experiments from the spiraling ladder of someone who has spread out her root hairs and patiently attends the right words to assign; one who is there to honor the instant something shimmers before it disappears, be 'it' the meaning of 'all this' or the lack thereof, not unlike Mr. Worthington photographing a droplet's splash he so ingeniously rigged to measure. And what doesn't Genine Lentine's aqueous breath expel--a disquisition on Softsoap, a sideways look at the motivational expression of Grenville Kleiser, the speed of sperm, along with a little consideration of the comma, the prefix un-, the contour of a vowel. Ms. Lentine's experiments begin and end with the parent body as it breaks away, that 'which asks nothing of us, only that we're here for it.'" She is here. --C.D. Wright "These thrilling poems--restless, calm, reckless, wise--interrogate themselves by hovering over moments of aching beauty, as well as utter bewilderment, until they become the world itself." --Nick Flynn

Genres: Poetry

78 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 2010

About the author

Genine Lentine is the author of the chapbooks Mr. Worthington's Beautiful Experiments on Splashes (2010) and Poses: An Essay Drawn from the Model (2012). Her poems, essays, and interviews can be found in DIAGRAM, American Poetry Review, the Poetry Foundation website, Tricycle, Quarterly West, Provincetown Arts; O: The Oprah Magazine; Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, and Ninth Letter. She received an MS in theoretical linguistics from Georgetown University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is a 2012 Lucas Literary Arts Fellow at Montalvo Arts Center and has also received residencies from Headlands, Hedgebrook, and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, as well as being Artist-in-Residence at San Francisco Zen Center.

Reviews

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

I reviewed this for New Pages, so check it out here