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    Break the Glass
    Break the Glass
    Break the Glass
    Ebook85 pages40 minutes

    Break the Glass

    By Jean Valentine

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    About this ebook

    "As elliptical and demanding as Emily Dickinson, Valentine consistently rewards the reader."Library Journal

    In her eleventh collectionhonored as a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in poetryJean Valentine characteristically weds a moral imperative to imaginative and linguistic leaps and bounds. Whether writing elegies, meditations on aging, or an extended homage to Lucy, the earliest known hominid, the pared-down compactness of her tone and vision reveals a singular voice in American poetry. As Adrienne Rich has said of Valentine's work, "This is a poetry of the highest order, because it lets us into spaces and meanings we couldn't approach in any other way."

    From "If a Person Visits Someone in a Dream, in Some Cultures the Dreamer Thanks Them":

    At a hotel in another star. The rooms were cold and
    damp, we were both at the desk at midnight asking if
    they had any heaters. They had one heater. You are
    ill, please you take it. Thank you for visiting my dream.

    *
    Can you breathe all right?
    Break the glass shout
    break the glass force the room
    break the thread Open
    the music behind the glass . . .

    Jean Valentine, a former State Poet of New York, earned a National Book Award, the Wallace Stevens Award, and the Shelley Memorial Prize. She has taught at Sarah Lawrence, New York University, and Columbia University. She lives in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of New York City.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateJul 15, 2013
    ISBN9781619320147
    Break the Glass

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    • 4/5
      A quite epigrammatic collection of poems, quiet but with depth of thought and feeling.
    • 4/5
      Powerful and musical lyric poems of lamentation and reverie that blend the pain and wonder of modern life with the resonance of classical mythos. A strong collection by an important voice in contemporary American poetry.

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    Break the Glass - Jean Valentine

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