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Loading... Scranton Lace (2018)by Margot Douaihy
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. Looms and lace provide many of the images and metaphors embedded in these poems, whose author draws on local history of the Scranton Lace Company, a once thriving factory that employed thousands of people, mostly women, during its 120 years of productivity. The poet and the illustrator used actual pieces of lace, long stored and disused, to inspire their work, even making relief prints from those pieces dipped in ink. Some of the poems seem beyond understanding for a reader not involved in their creation, but others reward multiple readings. In particular, I cannot leave "Looming", a pantoum, alone. It's mesmerizing. The 13 connected pieces featuring Nour and Elizabeth, two lace workers, are the heart of the collection, as I see it, but the logic of dispersing them among the other selections is so far not clear to me. I recommend this collection to anyone serious about the form, and suspect I am missing a lot by not being well-enough "versed" in it myself. ( ) no reviews | add a review
"Scranton Lace by Margot Douaihy combines tremendous lyric gifts-dense, nervy music, evocative images, an almost classically tragic sense of life's doomed blooming-with a gritty vernacularity that roots these poems in the rusted factory life of the title. Often formally playful but always brimming with emotion, using repetition in ways that evoke the ghostly graphics of lace woven through the book. Douaihy sings poetry's repertoire of love, loss, time and trial in keys that are wholly her own." -Joy Ladin "Margot Douaihy's Scranton Lace is a gorgeous meditation on place, on where we came from and what shapes and makes us. She speaks for anyone who's ever been too scared to go 'into the unknown, & . . . too scared not to.' This book immerses us into the beautiful and broken parts of ourselves in gorgeously-crafted, soul-showing poems." -Aaron Smith "In Scranton Lace, Douaihy unpacks an intimate gay American past, layers it like an essay, complicates it with detail, cool, big images, memory, loss and slippage, so that back in the present, we can learn again what difficulty, privacy and history a person is, and how tender, profound and unlikely, our connections can be." -Jack Underwood No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.6Literature English (North America) American poetry 21st CenturyRatingAverage:
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