Perfect Disappearance

by Martha Rhodes

Overview

In Perfect Disappearance, the much anticipated follow-up to Martha Rhodes’ startling first book, we shift gears: the damaged child/woman has grown into a full-fledged adult who continues to speak for this singular “unkillable” life. Rhodes now enters new realms of the darkly erotic conjoined with the liberated sensibility of a survivor. Cagey, evasive, subservient, unappeasable, Rhodes animates her speakers with a voice full of grit and urgency, and the results are electrifying.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780932826992
Publisher:	New Issues Poetry and Prose
Publication date:	09/01/2000
Series:	New Issues Poetry and Prose Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	51
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.75(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

MARTHA RHODES is a founding editor and the director of Four Way Books. She holds degrees from New School University (BA) and from the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College (MFA). She is the author of four collections of poetry: The Beds (Autumn House, 2012), Mother Quiet (University of Nebraska Press / Zoo, 2004), Perfect Disappearance (2000 Green Rose Prize, New Issues Press), and At the Gate (Provincetown Arts, 1995). She has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California, Irvine. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She also has taught at The Frost Place, Third Coast Writer’s Conference, Bucknell University’s June Seminar for Younger Writers, and The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. She is a frequent panelist at universities and conferences around the country. She is the current director of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry. She lives in NYC.

What People are Saying About This

Gregory Orr

“It might be the wind; it might be a whim from within the self or from some powerful other, but suddenly the world is rendered profoundly unstable in these haunted and haunting poems. We encounter a sense of jeopardy all the more unsettling for the poet's linguistic control and astute, shaping intelligence. As if all the gifts of poetic ordering are only just adequate to the dark that animated the poems (and the world). We are placed squarely and powerfully in an intimate version of Rilke's vision of beauty as ‘nothing but beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear.’”

Editorial Reviews

Rhodes' allusiveness is grouded in the psychological symbolism of deep-image poetry rather than the intertextuality of postmodernism. She uses dreams, dreams of ghosts, and dreamlike symbols: a house, the wind, and a bridge between the living and the dead, dream and reality, memory and imagination. These symbols represent the poet, and the poet's relationship to experience. Rhodes writes about her experience, but even as she uses disruptive and transgressive images, she does not rhetorically dramatize her experience. Instead, where what she represents is her self, she foregrounds the notion that representation does violence to what is represented.”—Catherine Daly, Frigate

From the Publisher