Stupid Hope: Poems

by Jason Shinder

Overview

The final collection by the late Jason Shinder, "one of the finest of our new poets" (Gerald Stern)

I close my eyes and try to remember
when I was unopposed, when I started to die,
buoyant, fragrant, shuddering with love.
—from "Before"

Jason Shinder's last poems are his moving testimonies to poetry, love, and friendship. With power, clarity, and disarming humor, the poems confront grief and mortality with a humility and fortitude that come only "with hope, stupid hope." Stupid Hope is Shinder's wry, penetrating, and wise farewell.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555975333
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	08/04/2009
Edition description:	Original
Pages:	88
Sales rank:	550,476
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

Jason Shinder (1955–2008) was the author of two previous poetry collections and the editor of The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. He directed the YMCA National Writer's Voice and taught at the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

Editorial Reviews

A wonderful strange humor and deep wisdom—what we need.” —Allen Ginsberg on Jason Shinder

“Jason Shinder's second book of poems, the lovely and tortuous Among Women, forges a new place in the tradition of the journeying soul. Shinder . . . possesses a subtle, idiosyncratic, and revolutionary voice.” —Provincetown Arts

From the Publisher

By most accounts Shinder—who died from cancer at 52 last year—led active social and professional lives. A community organizer among poets, he edited numerous anthologies and founded the YMCA's National Writer's Voice program. But like the two volumes of poetry that preceded it, this third, posthumous collection, edited by his friends, gives voice to "The whipped soul, the whacked and wounded self," a persona embalmed in a loneliness so impenetrable and hopeless that the conditions of life and death seem interchangeable. He speaks of "The strange sickness of being alive" and tells himself, "Maybe you inhabit a death." Interspersed with poems about his dying mother, Shinder's meditations on his own dire circumstances are largely devoid of image and figuration, soft-spoken and somber if not entirely humorless ("The cancer saved me from having to go/ to another book party") and suggest a grim, almost relieved acquiescence to the inevitable. VERDICT Though confessional in tone, these poems are never harrowing, their aspirations to intimacy undercut by an all-too-passive fatalism. For poetry insiders.—Fred Muratori, Cornell Univ. Lib., Ithaca, NY

Library Journal