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Book Cover for: Silk Road, Daneen Wardrop

Silk Road

Daneen Wardrop

Silk Road tracks the economic intrigues between continents as they occur sometimes obliquely in the everyday life of Marco Polo's wife, Donata Badoer Polo. In daily activities such as marketing, her imaginative interventions disclose a global and personal economics. Donata's reveries arise in the breach between her home in Venice, Italy, and Marco's travels in Suzhou, China, prompting her to apprehend the ways eastern and western hemispheres coincide and collide, the ways the spice, silk, and jewel trades have resulted in the financing of warfare and slavery, such apprehension affecting also her intimacy with her husband. She perceives as well how the construction of stories, such as those Marco tells, carry a power that affects the interchanges between these newly intertwined worlds of East and West. Though Donata Polo lives during the middle ages, she thinks as a kind of global citizen, albeit staying at home. Donata exists in the vivid divide between regions at odds, even as her meditations find a geopolitical brace of camaraderie. She lived an unrecorded life in medieval Venice with her husband Marco and their three daughters, Fantina, Bellela, and Moreta. While a plethora of material by and about Marco is available, very little about Donata exists. Silk Road is written in the voice of a figure who, effaced by history, compels the act of reimagining.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Etruscan Press
  • Publish Date: Oct 9th, 2018
  • Pages: 88
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.70in - 5.80in - 0.10in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9780998750828
  • Categories: American - GeneralSubjects & Themes - PlacesSubjects & Themes - Family

About the Author

Wardrop, Daneen: - Daneen Wardrop is the author of seven books, including three collections of poetry: The Odds of Being, Cyclorama, and most recently Life as It, which received the 2017 Independent Publisher Book Award. She is a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and a Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America.

Praise for this book

Daneen Wardrop's poetry collection Cyclorama is, indeed, cycloramic in scope, expertly tackling, through searing dramatic monologues, both the traumas of the Civil War and the metaphysics of seeing. If the poem has traditionally been thought of as sister to the painting, Wardrop tries to expand these siblings' domains by stretching them to cycloramic proportions that can contain the fraught narrative she chronicles. This is no small feat, and one she achieves with grace. This collection also comes to us at a time when we could all afford to take a multivalent look at the past and present of American violence. --Caroline Hagood, Kenyon Review, 2016