Turning to Fiction: Poems

by Donna Masini

Overview

Daring and witty, erotic and searching, these poems explore the ways we suffer and are changed by our losses.

"Think about sex," this book begins, then moves through the places into which our longings lead us. Here are confessions whispered over the phone in "Phone Sex," sins recounted to priests, "pretend confessions" told to a sister. Here are poems about a mother teaching a daughter to read, a girl trying to read her mother, a woman trying to read lovers, and marriage, and herself.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393328448
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	04/17/2006
Pages:	114
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Donna Masini is the author of three collections of poetry and a novel. She was awarded the Barnard Women Poets Prize, a Pushcart Prize, a fellowship with the New York Foundation for the Arts, and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. She teaches at Hunter College and lives in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

A book of body and soul—the profane reading the sacred, the sacred scolding the profane.

Eavan Boland

A virtuoso conductor of the orchestra of the broken heart.

Billy Collins

In her new work, Masini (winner of the Barnard Poets Prize for That Kind of Danger) uses short lines, enjambment, and a climax that ends in the middle of nowhere to give these generally free-verse poems a whirling-dervish effect. "Spiritual Awakening," for instance, compares readings by the likes of Meister Eckhart and St. Augustine to being awakened by two cats. As the poem ends, the cats eat turkey cuts and gravy, while on the floor beside them, the overwrought poet seems to be waiting for God. Other poems are breathy and confessional, some literally; there's a villanelle about going to confession. Many poems achieve a much-ado-about-nothing energy by blending mysticism and sex. "Communion," for example, about both receiving Communion and having oral sex, feels warped at best. Not that it's wrong to blend the spiritual and the erotic-that mixture has fueled poets from Pablo Neruda to Louise Glick. But while Neruda and Gl ck seek the universal metaphor, Masini, who finds metaphors in the quotidian details of her life-reading a book, having sex, watching a movie, giving blood-seldom transcends the personal. Recommended for large collections in academic libraries only.-Diane Scharper, Towson Univ., MD Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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