Tiny Extravaganzas

Diane Mehta

Paperback

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Tiny Extravaganzas, Diane Mehta's fiercely lyrical new collection, works the American sentence to its limits. Mehta's poems are miniaturist examinations of art, aging, literature, grief, parenting, the sublime, labor, and faith. She chases rhythm, rhymes with wit, and upends formal verse with phrasing that moves like jazz against and within tradition. Art is both anchor and a framework for understanding the world, and each poem is an opportunity to have a conversation with the reader and with art and other artists. Her poems vary from small, contemplative musical interludes to epic poems about collective suffering. Mehta's refined and propulsive poems come with an emotional bang that quietly breaks your heart.

Book Details

Publisher: Arrowsmith Press
Publish Date: Oct 15th, 2023
Pages: 136
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 9.00in - 6.00in - 0.32in - 0.46lb
EAN: 9798987924112
Categories: • American - General• Women Authors

About the Author

Mehta, Diane: - Diane Mehta was born in Frankfurt, grew up in Bombay and New Jersey, studied in Boston, and now makes her home in New York City. She is the author of the poetry collection, Forest with Castanets (Four Way, 2019), as well as a poetics and style guide, How to Write Poetry (Barnes & Noble Books, 2005), and the essay collection Happier Far (University of Georgia Press 2024-25). Her work has been recognized by the Peter Heinegg Literary Award, the Café Royal Cultural Foundation, a Kirby-Mewshaw fellowship at Civitella Ranieri, and a fellowship at Yaddo. She was the founding managing editor of A Public Space, launched and edited Glossolalia for PEN America to publish writing from traditionally underrepresented languages, and was executive nonfiction editor for Guernica.

Praise for this book

"Dynamic diction is the pulsing heart of Mehta's excellent second book. Eschewing traditional narrative structures, she opts to create soundscapes that reflect and reinterpret events through a fragmented syntax: 'Flingabout night swung in with dead leaves and young bats/ screeching. Acrobatic papers, phonemes scatting.' Mehta's approach to rhythm and rhyme upends traditional verse forms with phrasing that moves like jazz, both against and within established poetic traditions." Starred review in Publishers Weekly

"In meditations on 'fortunate times / and quicksand feelings, ' Mehta, a poet in New York City, induces a staccato rhythm of poetic effusion, darting from insight to insight, with the graceful and erratic comportment of one 'wandering by accident or design / a way to find your tongue.' She probes the 'curve and scaw of personality' through lively stylistic devices...'" David Woo, LitHub

"Language that shimmers and reinvents, words that challenge and direct the reader's attention, lush settings and private musings-these are all foundational components in Diane Mehta's work, Tiny Extravaganzas. One must finally argue: they are not tiny, they are the world made tangible, cracked open, reimagined, dusted and shined for us to experience as well." Carlene Guadapee, MicroLit

"Diane Mehta's ekphrastic poems dilate and amplify and burn, enact that Yeatsian notion that '[a]rt is love modeled in experience / fired at higher temperatures than experience.' These poems give us a speaker whose unruly feelings are wildly metered, and 'who refuses to cohere in an abstract field.' She takes in the whole 'bee-vibrating' world through the senses."

-Diane Seuss

author of frank: sonnets

"These are lavish, lush poems about the power of art. Diane Mehta's attention to the music that lives in words and the metaphorical possibilities that inhabit images is astonishing. A building 'leans into its shade of angles' and a flower is 'burdened by its scent, its silhouette all season / petaling and unpetaling.' Her erudite and complex mind steps always to the side, to observe, to think. 'My clocks tick-tock with caveats, ' Mehta tells us. 'No peace of mind.'"

-Kevin Prufer

author of Fear