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A Table of Content

Poems

Graywolf Press

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ISBN10: 1555974023
ISBN13: 9781555974022

Paperback

72 Pages

$16.00

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The renowned painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning, now in her nineties, here presents a widely hailed and truly remarkable first book of poems. In A Table of Content, we are made to see more clearly the city's landscape, the creator's impulse, and the interconnected worlds of potential disaster and sensual erotics. These are poems by a writer whose vision and voice both rise easily above taste, trend, and time.

Reviews

Praise for A Table of Content

"At 93, Dorothea Tanning, who has had a long and marvelous life as a visual artist, is our most surprising new poet. She is an audacious dreamer, and the spirit of creativity, the sheer joy of making things, is everywhere apparent in her restless, inventive, energetic, and triumphant first book of poems."—The Washington Post Book World

"This internationally known painter and sculptor's debut collection is a curious mix of numerous styles: confessionalism, Whitmanic declaration, a self-containment worthy of Merrill. The stance that speaks loudest is a straightforward, unmannered approach to the deconstruction of icons, references, and symbols."—Publishers Weekly

"Like collages, softly surreal, delicately personal, but somehow perfectly right, these works paste together the tangible with what's not, drawing images from life, family, places, and ideas, and showing what was and what could be . . . There is not a reckless moment in these poems; each word is a deliberate mental stroke, somehow perfectly right."—Library Journal

"Some would call these poems collages, finery glued into dreamy images. But I prefer to call the whole of them a kaleidoscope—angled feelings and dappled ideas constantly shape-shifting into remarkable new patterns, by turns giddy and grave. And when you put the little device down, you realize you've all along been looking at your own life, grandly reimagined by a master. Dorothea Tanning's verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves. She wears her soul on her sleeve, and it shines, it shines!"—J. D. McClatchy