Dante's Unintended Flight

by Emily Vogel

Overview

Dante’s Unintended Flight is series of linked prose poems, inspired by Vogel’s two-week hiatus in Florence, Italy, in the summer of 2014. It contends with the complexities of gender--particularly womanhood, which Vogel weaves as being a maelstrom of contradictions, quandaries, and conundrums. It is set across a span of time in the city of Florence, and alludes to both history and modern society. These poems also give a nod to feminist theory in the context of fragmented story. The complicated and sometimes incendiary relationship between “man” and “woman” is illustrated here in a very surreal and introspective narrative, which extends as if a prolonged dream, amid what would be the almost “drugged” haziness of summer in perpetual flight.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781630450465
Publisher:	NYQ Books
Publication date:	02/15/2017
Pages:	80
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.19(d)

About the Author

Emily Vogel's poetry, reviews, essays, and translations have most recently been published in Omniverse, The Paterson Literary Review, Lips, City Lit Rag, Luna Luna, Maggy, Lyre Lyre, The Comstock Review, The Broome Review, Tiferet, The San Pedro River Review, 2 Bridges Review, and PEN, among others. She is the author of five chapbooks, and two full-length collections: The Philosopher's Wife (Chester River Press, 2011) and First Words (NYQ Books, 2015); as well as, a collaborative book of poetry, West of Home, with her husband Joe Weil (Blast Press). She has work forthcoming in The Boston Review, Fiolet & Wing: An Anthology of Domestic Fabulism, and The North American Review. She teaches writing at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College, and lives with her husband, the poet Joe Weil, and their two children, Clare and Gabriel.

Editorial Reviews

In this gathering of prose poems, Vogel traces a "tentative thread of thought" that spans the domestic and the expansive worlds that men and women carry within themselves as constructed truths and contradictions. Dante's Unintended Flight offers a steadfast foundation built on a bedrock of dreaming and mythmaking. -Tara Betts, author of Break the Habit

Dante's Unintended Flight is a tour de force! A narrative in moments, or as the writer Pam Houston might call these linked prose pieces, "glimmers," Vogel makes the personal universal in lyrical, often ecstatic bursts of images, that are ultimately about love-not loving enough or perhaps too much-and longing, so much longing, for some manifestation of a celestial presence amongst the mundane: a man cooking tomatoes; a little boy dreaming; a little girl placing a pan at the feet of a woman, and birds that... "rise again as if resurrected from their tiny deaths." Vogel's language is gorgeous, her assertions about life in the moment, startling and true. A powerful and compelling new book from a first-rate chronicler of the adoration and despair at the heart of the twenty-first century family.
-Jaimee Wriston Colbert author of Wild Things

Written in a language like nothing you've ever heard before, Emily Vogel's latest collection of sinister and incisive prose poems illuminates the rifts between man and woman and god and defiantly sings into those voids where the heart fails us but nevertheless proves that nothing is possible without heart.
-Danniel Schoonebeek author of Trébuchet

From the Publisher