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Book Cover for: Sorry Was in the Woods, Michelle Taransky

Sorry Was in the Woods

Michelle Taransky

In a woods where bodger and cabinet maker are at work, Michelle Taransky's second collection of poems, Sorry Was In The Woods is that landscape where perspective is not singular, where waiting, worrying, watching, and recording are able to both arrange and derange our understanding of place. Taransky's subject matter suggests our pressing need to face directly into the reality of each moment, and to question what it means to be moral in this troubled world of ecological and cultural calamity. Yet her surprising language use and references will invite her readers to walk with her through the forest of Yeats' and Howe's Seven Woods, and to feel the presence of Bob Perelman's leaves, Zukofsky's bough, Olson's hand, and Gertrude Stein's tree. In these compelling poems, a reader will find many familiar images and figures, and yet sense how the forest of event is always just beyond our capacity to describe or understand it. A sense of fear and wonder at our circumstance is one of Taransky's great gifts to us, one of her finest achievements.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Omnidawn
  • Publish Date: Apr 1st, 2013
  • Pages: 88
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 8.70in - 5.90in - 0.40in - 0.30lb
  • EAN: 9781890650810
  • Categories: Women AuthorsSubjects & Themes - Animals & NatureAmerican - General

About the Author

A graduate of The University of Chicago and The Iowa Writers Workshop, MICHELLE TARANSKY lives in Philadelphia and is a member of the Critical Writing Faculty at University of Pennsylvania. She is Reviews Editor for Jacket2 and a regular guest on the poetry podcast series, "PoemTalk," a collaboration between Kelly Writers House and The Poetry Foundation. Taransky has also taught writing at University of Iowa, Rutgers University in Camden, and Temple University, and worked as an arts administrator at literary arts organizations including The Poetry Center of Chicago, The International Writing Program, The Kelly Writers House at University of Pennsylvania, and Flying Object in South Hadley, MA. Since 2007, Taransky and Emily Pettit have coordinated the Whenever We Feel Like It reading series, which is archived on PennSound. Taransky's poems have been anthologized in The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta Press 2012), Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat/Telephone 2012), Disco Prairie Social Aid and Pleasure Club (Factory Hollow, 2010) and The City Visible: Chicago Poetry For The New Century (Cracked Slab, 2007). With her father, architect and artist Richard Taransky, she co-authored the chapbook The Plans Caution, published by QUEUE books. Brave Men Press published No, I Will Be In The Woods in 2011.

Praise for this book

"Taransky's poems demonstrate how art commutes the meanings to which words can be sentenced."--Ida Stewart "Kenyon Review" (5/1/2015 12:00:00 AM)
"I will be in Michelle Taransky's woods. . . . I will go there to see what she says . . . and I'm pretty sure I'll be better off everafter." --Dara Wier, director, University of Massachusetts-Amherst Program for Poets and Writers
"Who knows what lyric lurks in word's woods? Michelle Taransky's elusively alluring poems make a path. They beckon. Listen." --Charles Bernstein, author, "Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions"
Kenyon Review"
Taransky s poems demonstrate how art commutes the meanings to which words can be sentenced. Ida Stewart, Kenyon Review"