Starfish

by Pauline Uchmanowicz

Overview

With linguistic precision and visual dexterity, Starfish explores the bottomless depths of human intimacy and loss, reconciled against the vastness of the ocean and infinity of the cosmos. What if we had to pick: "The ocean or the stars. / A reputation in truth telling or a prize in diplomacy?" ("Elements of Style"). At times rendered through the perception of a "year-rounder" residing in a tourist locale, its poems offer close-up portraits of individuals bounded by shorelines yet attuned to expansive horizons. Alert to how elemental symbols delight as well as unsettle us, the book as a whole weighs the ceaseless negotiation of our actions against the limits of temporality.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940157998837
Publisher:	Twelve Winters Press
Publication date:	02/27/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	78
File size:	230 KB

About the Author

Pauline Uchmanowicz is the author of two poetry chapbooks and has received residency grants at the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. A freelance writer in the Hudson Valley, her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in Crazyhorse, Ohio Review, Ploughshares, Provincetown Arts Journal, Radcliffe Quarterly, Woodstock Times, Z Magazine, and elsewhere. She is associate professor of English and director of Creative Writing at SUNY New Paltz.

Editorial Reviews

There's a secret life of things in Pauline Uchmanowicz's beautiful Starfish. Here, the ordinary, with gravity and whimsy, gives purchase to the extraordinary. It's a poetry of hard truths, with boys "slender like slide rules," and tuning forks "strewn like discarded wishbones." You should read this book.

author of Furs Not Mine - Andrea Cohen

Pauline Uchmanowicz approaches her carefully chosen subjects from fresh and unexpected angles.?She wastes no words, isn't afraid to feel deeply, and knows how to round out a poem to a satisfying finish.?All these are abilities not usual nowadays.??It's a tremendous pleasure to discover work so able and accessible. Starfish can only rate high among outstanding poetry books of its year

author of Dark Horses - X. J. Kennedy

Pauline Uchmanowicz writes in a poem about a girl's "attention poised / on the frontier that separates / matter from logic." Those lines could be a definition of the poems in Starfish, and a definition of what good poems should do in general. These poems pay exquisite attention. They are strong, hyper-alert, and true

author of God Particles - Thomas Lux