Anthropy

by Ray Hsu

Overview

The poems in Anthropy fuse the scope of classical traditions to the disturbing agility of the moderns. Hsu artfully presents the fierce rigour of the philosophical mind engaged with the survival of histories.

Anthropy, Ray Hsu's first book-length collection, is a work of extraordinary range and precision. Excavating sites of human cruelty and endurance, intimacy and experience, Hsu puts forth the language to lead us into the inferno of our time.

He brings us to a place where the living, the dead, and the imaginary cross paths. Odysseus meets Fernando Pessoa, James Dean meets Walter Benjamin. All struggle with the same problem: their pasts, visceral and desperate, continue to burn with the intensity of the present.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780889711976
Publisher:	Nightwood Editions
Publication date:	09/30/2004
Pages:	88
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Ray Hsu is a poet, activist and scholar. His first book Anthropy won the 2005 League of Canadian Poets' Gerald Lampert Award and was shortlisted for the Trillium Book Award for Poetry. He has published over a hundred poems in more than thirty-five journals across Canada, the US and the UK, including Fence, The Fiddlehead and New American Writing. He teaches creative writing at the University of British Columbia. His second collection, Cold Sleep Permanent Afternoon, was published by Nightwood in 2010.

Editorial Reviews

It's anthropology remade in the freewheeling, crisply detached style of postmodernism ... Hsu's work resembles that of Anne Carson, the celebrated Montreal writer and classics scholar who combines cultural references to the ancient world with a cool (in both senses of the word) contemporary voice. Brainy and eclectic ... The pleasures of Anthropy lie in watching an inventive mind excavate public history and private life for lessons about memory, identity and progress ... Tantalizing and thought-provoking.
—Barbara Carey, Toronto Star

Ray Hsu is a poet of perspective ... Anthropy is, roughly translated, about being human ... [E]motionally satisfying and formally accomplished ... Some of the poems, like "Pneuma," are marvels.
—Chris Jennings, Arc

Ray Hsu's Anthropy reminds me of Ondaatje's Coming Through Slaughter, with its disjunctive narrative style and figurative language. Just as Ondaatje writes a poetic historiography of Buddy Bolden, Hsu recasts the life story of Walter Benjamin. He integrates references to Benjamin as well as James Dean, Dante, Daedalus, Odysseus, Dostoyevsky, Virgil, James Joyce, Diomedes, Menelaus, Helen, Kenzaburo, Midas, Chet Baker, and Fernando Pessoa. This crowd of historical figures is brought to life: the famous interact with each other, other characters, real or imagined, and the poet himself. The result is a surreal commingling of times, people and places, a dream of apparitions ... This is not garden-variety Canadian lyric narrative. It's a hard book, but the poetry is simple at times and the lyrics beautiful.
—Gillian Jerome, Canadian Literature

Toronto writer Ray Hsu's first book, Anthropy ... is genuinely interesting. This text is marked by intellectual engagement. Unlike most first books, which rely on the confessional lyric as their dominant genre, Hsu's writings more resemble dramatic monologues, where a variety of characters, historical and contemporary, speak their minds. Many of the poems treat human isolation and the attempt to overcome it through words or music ... [o]ther poems, like "Concordance" and "Meantime," focus on words and the difficulties of transmitting meaning.
—Alison Calder, Winnipeg Free Press

Good poetry intrigues the reader with the promise of a challenge ... Hsu is anything but one-dimensional ... a gifted young writer.
—Andrew Vaisius, Books In Canada (Toronto)

From the Publisher