Chinoiserie

Poetry. Winner of the 2011 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, selected by Paul Hoover, CHINOISERIE travels through centuries in poems that carve wonder from ruin, from an illuminated manuscript to New York on the eve of disaster, the Emperor's nightingale to neon aquariums. A sensory flight, intricate in its vision, Ecclesiastic in its hunger, and brutal in its portrayal of a solitude that "could surrender / to the hammer or the flame," this book of curiosities draws inspiration from 15th century masters, Japanese animation, mid-century films, Marguerite Duras, and other sources. Inspired by an art created miles from its origins to become its own translation of landscape, texture, and pattern, CHINOISERIE disrupts boundaries between tribute and theft, reinvention and repetition. It evokes the fanciful as well as a darker potentiality, seeking a language "of pearl and roaring."