Grand & Arsenal (Iowa Poetry Prize) - Award-Winning Poetry Collection for Literature Lovers, Book Clubs & Gift Ideas" （注：由于原标题是书名/诗集名称，我保留了原标题作为核心关键词，同时增加了：1）"Award-Winning"突出荣誉属性 2）"Poetry Collection"明确品类 3）"Literature Lovers, Book Clubs & Gift Ideas"三个典型使用场景，覆盖读者、社群活动和礼品需求）
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Product Description
From the intersection of public and private fear, Kerri Webster’s award-winning collection speaks of anxiety and awe, vanishings and reappearances. A city both rises and falls; worlds are simultaneously spoken into being and torn down by words. “This is how time sounds,” Webster writes; this is the hum and click of bodies “desirous of believing we’re all vehicle, every wet atom of us,” even as the saved seeds root in the fallen brickwork and the artifacts pile up: wisdom teeth, hummingbird skulls, plumb bobs, icons, antlers, incandescent bulbs. Grand & Arsenal begins “Bless me I am not myself,” but it is not long before the probability of being blessed is revealed to be as remote as the concept of a whole self. Thus begins the book’s defining struggle, enacted by a multitude of voices which move from rush to stumble and back again—meanwhile using all the tools we as a culture use to hold fear at arm’s length.We hear a familiar irony, as in “On a trip West, porn in the hotel room. I can take or leave it. The climax that puts me in the seats? World’s end.” We hear humor, as in “I believed in . . . / . . . a certain apocalypse not so much foretold as crafted / by large-brained monkeys.” We hear understatement, as in “knowing it does not matter / in the grand—she would say scheme, I would say / mishap—.” Most importantly, though, these poems allow for the fleeting triumph of an undefended voice, which appears often to emerge tentatively from a sort of exhausted collapse.
Customer Reviews
The intersection of Grand and Arsenal in the city of St. Louis is one part park, three parts commercial. Arsenal Street actually does a little zigzag as it crosses Grand and then runs the length of Tower Grove Park, which is due south of the Missouri Botanical Garden. Like so much of the city of St. Louis, the residential buildings in the area are red brick.The area is also "in transition." Not that long ago, the transition was in the direction of poor. Now, the transition is in the direction of hope. The intersection marks the beginning of an area known for ethnic restaurants, food stores and other Vietnamese, Ethiopian, Mexican, Middle Eastern and other establishments. A few blocks to the southwest is Little Bosnia - the largest settlement of Bosnia outside Bosnia itself. Thousands of Bosnians fled the Serbian war in the early 1990s and settled in St. Louis.Eclectic, a jumble of cultures, neighborhoods transitioned from old South St. Louis with its German and Italian founders to newly arrived immigrants - that's Grand and Arsenal. But it still looks largely like it always did, in a kind of defiant red-brick splendor tying people and cultures together."Grand & Arsenal: Poems" by Kerri Webster is something like that neighborhood in south St. Louis, and she took the name from the intersection. Webster, who was writer-in-residence for Washington University in St. Louis from 2006 to 2010 (she now lives in her native Idaho), won the Iowa Poetry Prize for this collection. And it is filled with references to the city that only residents might recognize.But the appeal of these poems is broader than only to St. Louisans. They are delightful, learned, approachable, historical and regional, and replete with literary references to Hawthorne, Lucretius, Ovid and even Agatha Christie.Webster maintains an irregular rhythm throughout the collection, often stringing together what appear to be unrelated and disjointed lines, ideas, and observations, until the reader catches the deeper, internal rhythms. Her words are like polished shards of stone and glass, sharp and pointed. Consider "Places I Haven't Slept:"An island. The campground. In sixteenstates. At the sleep clinic, wantingto strip the electrodes offand glide home. Such feeble means: pill, wine, loopedsea sounds. In whatever bedlistening to breath, my body calledby what, jerking, muscles holding their animalstartle. By the Mississippiin the house of sleeping women, bargessliding past, my chest thickwith damp. The prophets thumbtacked to the wallwatching as I watched back.In apparent homage to Rilke (and possibly Flannery O'Conner), Webster writes "Letter to a Young Poet," and offers sound if slightly irregular advice:Do whatever it takes to rest. When sorrowSites on your chest, give him a lick. I have no clueIf I'm old or young. I think you're a young ladywho should know I've never been to a castle,though I did spend a day at the Climatron and,after, scooped lotus pods from the mud. Theydidn't dry too well. I wish you well. It's possiblefor a year to forget where it left itself. Don'tworry. The trees immolate. My waking dreamsinvolve shoeing horses, pounding silver sheetinto a lake...(In case you don't know, the Climatron is the geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller to house the tropical plant collection at the Missouri Botanical Garden; it's about four blocks in a straight line from the intersection of Grand and Arsenal.)I loved this collection, and not only because of the St. Louis references. Webster describes a landscape here, an urban landscape I know and experience every day. I've often biked near the intersection, and have had friends who lived in the area.The poems in "Grand & Arsenal" are true.
