Imperfect Present: Poems

by Sharon Dolin

Overview

Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822988878
Publisher:	University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date:	09/06/2022
Series:	Pitt Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	96
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living, Whirlwind, and Burn and Dodge, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of a prose memoir titled Hitchcock Blonde and two books of translation: Book of Minutes by Gemma Gorga and the prize-winning Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga. A 2021 National Endowment for the Arts [SA1] Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize winner, and recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, she lives in New York City, where she teaches poetry workshops and is associate editor of Barrow Street Press.

Table of Contents

Contents Make Your Home in the Imperfect Present I: If I Told You My Life in a Coffee Cup If I Told You Kafka’s Hands How Many Secrets? Ammonite The Pangolin 8.3 Billion Metric Tons Ode to Chufa Passepartout Ode to Pubic Hair Black Leather Backpack The Loneliness of His Death, the Death of His Loneliness To Wait and to Hope How Do I Fix the World Courage! II: Appearances Self-Portrait as Corncrake Midnight in Paris Cinquains to Pablo At the Fountain of the Fallen Angel in Retiro Park Cancelled Letter to Antoni Gaudí It Takes So Little Evening Storms Cinquains of Doubt Innocence Trilogy of Hands Trilogy of Doubt Doubtful Doubtful Profile Three-Quarter View Trilogy of Death Trilogy of Tears and Smiles III: Oblique Strategies Trust in the You of Now Turn It Upside Down Emphasize the Flaws Only a Part, Not the Whole The Most Important Is Most Easily Forgotten Give Way to Your Worst Impulse Accretion Not Building a Wall but Making a Brick Do We Need Holes? Repetition Is a Form of Change Do Nothing for as Long as Possible Where’s the Edge? Honor Thy Error as a Hidden Intention Overtly Resist Change Be Extravagant Use Filters Reverse Don’t Break the Silence IV: From the Dream Notebooks My Life as an Open Air Temple A Dream Is One-Sixtieth Part of Prophecy I Have Dreamt a Dream and I Do Not Know What It Is A Good Dream Should Be Kept in Mind so It Will Be Fulfilled There Is No Dream Without Frivolity All Dreams Follow the Mouth A Dream That Has Not Been Interpreted Is Like a Letter That Has Not Been Read It May Be Spring The Water Where I Have Not Swum Mitzvah at Gordon Beach To the One Who Tames To the Ram’s Horn I Cannot Sound Two Stones Notes Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

In this masterclass in effervescent wordcraft, even as it ranges through troubled terrain, Sharon Dolin proves to be a poet for the love of sanity. Seven collections of poetry, a Pushcart Prize, 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, and Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress all attest to her boundless talent.— Foreword Reviews

Imperfect Present is a stunning book, not simply for its depth of feeling, piercing wit, and well-earned wisdom but also for the brilliant play of language, the sheer sonic pleasures of it. Whether meditations on art, mortality, social justice, what it means to be and do good, these are poems startling both in their range and clarity of vision—at once delighting and jolting the mind toward recognition and a new apprehension of the world we thought we knew. I am reminded that Sharon Dolin is a poet for our time whose necessary voice I return to again and again.— Natasha Trethewey, former US poet laureate and author of Monument: Poems New and Selected

There are many ways to describe Imperfect Present, Sharon Dolin’s new collection of poems—delightful, earthy, erudite, engaging—but dazzling says it best. A master of form, Dolin offers a prismatic, often intimate, look at origins: language, country, belief, the self. Though many poems take on our worst imperfections—hatred, violence, degradation of the planet—others make room for generosity, an embrace of our failings, ‘the shattered pieces of some inconceivable whole.’ Imperfect Present is a powerful inquiry into what it means to be human, living in our present moment. As Dolin asks, ‘even in the midst of sorrow how may I—we—still summon joy?’— Ellen Bass, author of Indigo

Sharon Dolin’s marvelous new collection, Imperfect Present, brings with it her profound lyric intelligence and elegant, eloquent wit. Her brilliantly charged language embodies those shifting tensions, those often mercurial, often intense reflections that accompany us along the paths and passages of a life. Compassionate and compelling, Dolin’s collection is, as its title suggests, truly the perfect book for our imperfect present moment.— David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems

From the Publisher