UMass Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press

Book Jacket: "At the Site of Inside Out" by A. Rabinowitz

Anna Rabinowitz

Winner of the 1996 Juniper Prize

The poems in this volume are electric with energy and rich with linguistic invention. Anna Rabinowitz's voice, which ranges from reflective to prophetic, from passionate to wry, shapes and reshapes language to complete the partial, retrieve the lost, and salvage what remains when the human body and the bodies of family, culture, and history threaten to collapse. These are poems that confront loss and celebrate survival in a world that is "context and collage, icon and diehard, push and pull, conceived and holding on."

"This is what every writer longs for: a debut of intense invention, with language at a height and experience at a depth that the whole art suddenly appears as a plinth on the plain of American letters. Anna Rabinowitz brings us to the fulcrum of human change: memory as it is born, the body as it ages, vision as it limits time. Her voice is so bright that it explodes traditional ways of understanding, making us wiser and more playful, and as full of discovery as she is."

Molly Peacock
"Anna Rabinowitz brings to bear an astonishing display of formal resources, both traditional and invented, through which she explores boundaries of the human spirit. Attuned to the graphic particularities of individual and historic survival, at the heart of these poems is a deep regard for the mundane veracity and ferocity of life, which includes, at every turn, the life of language. 'Buyer of remnants, raveler of fact,' At the Site of Inside Out splendidly enriches the site of American poetry."

Ann Lauterbach
"Anna Rabinowitz has been biding her time, insinuating her intelligence into the interstices of this culture we are still inheriting from an unfolding (enfolding) century. The multiple techniques which surface throughout At the Site of Inside Out have this in common—they refit the shards of a culture not only into a kind of jigsaw puzzle, but beyond that into a meta-puzzle, ultimately convincing us of the beauty of this book's steady urgency, of this voice's 'calm in the unruly silence.'"

Bin Ramke

Anna Rabinowitz teaches writing at The New School. Her work has appeared in The Best American Poetry 1989, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, Sulfur,Southwest Review, and the Paris Review. She is editor of American Letters & Commentary.

Poetry
88 pp.
LC 96-48655
$20.00s cloth, ISBN 1-55849-092-2
$14.95t paper, ISBN 1-55849-093-0
1997
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