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Rayfish
Mary Hickman
€ 17.99
€ 16.45
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Description for Rayfish
Paperback. Num Pages: 80 pages. BIC Classification: DCF. Category: (P) Professional & Vocational. Dimension: 229 x 152 x 10. Weight in Grams: 136.
Mary Hickman's James Laughlin Award-winning second book, Rayfish, masterfully adopts and synthesizes the genre conventions of lyric poetry, nonfiction, and criticism, and extends the possibilities of each. Drawing on her childhood in China and Taiwan and her experience as an assistant in open-heart surgery, Rayfish combines the urgency and vulnerability of the lyric with meditative autobiographical accounting and the voices of numerous artists (Francis Bacon, Eva Hesse, Chaim Soutine, Ida Applebroog) to produce an uncanny chorus of voices. Haunted by the implications of making, these poems question how human beings can, with their limited resources (hand, material, vision, will), fight against the monsters...against neuroticism and fear. Rayfish brings the thinking of the collective into even greater alignment with the intimacy of the lyric, seeking a global space of communication and contact in a world increasingly at risk.
Product Details
Publisher
Omnidawn Publishing
Format
Paperback
Publication date
2017
Condition
New
Weight
136g
Number of Pages
80
Place of Publication
Richmond, CA, United States
ISBN
9781632430311
SKU
V9781632430311
Shipping Time
Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days
Ref
99-15
About Mary Hickman
MARY HICKMAN was born in Idaho and grew up in China and Taiwan. She holds an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where she was an Iowa Arts Fellow, and is the author of This Is the Homeland. She teaches creative writing at Nebraska Wesleyan University and in the University of Iowa International Writing Program's Between the Lines exchange program.
Reviews for Rayfish
Rayfish by Mary Hickman adopts and synthesizes the genre conventions of lyric poetry, nonfiction, and criticism, and extends the possibilities of each. Hickman's prose poems weave art and the body into the viscera of experience.
Publishers Weekly (1/1/2016 12:00:00 AM) Hickman (This Is the Homeland) fluidly melds poetry and prose in a collection crafted with an essayist's narrative certainty and a poet's dreamlike images and nonlinear sense of time. Though many of the James Laughlin Award-winning collection's poems find their starting points in art, they go beyond the ekphrastic, blending together the writer's response to a given work as well as biographical details and interviews about the piece and its artist.
Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) In Mary Hickman's Rayfish, the body is both indescribable and described, both inescapable and mortal: Soutine attempts to keep the color of his first carcasses fresh with buckets of blood, but also Anna is high in the air, higher than most men can leap. Her right knee folds beneath her even as her left thigh, ankle, and toes extend, pressed behind into darkness. In these poems
essays? but if they are essays, they're the most musical, and most poetically focused, essays I've ever read
the body is the source of the world in which the body suffers. And in this way, Rayfish ultimately tells a necessary story of America right now, an America attempting to overcome its hatred of the many different bodies of which it is made.
Shane McCrae, author of In the Language of My Captor Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) As a painter, I am utterly grateful for this book. To read these deceptively intimate texts is to learn how materials mean: a skin exchange with death, under fluorescent lights, in sterile conditions. In this encounter, touch heals and fouls; to look is to violate. We art-makers need language for process, for self-critique, for the thrilling backbend that is still at stake in the postmortem of Formalism or Process-Based art or Institutional Critique. What are we doing in our studios? Hickman folds multiple voices, of critic, maker, and maybe the ancient Greek chorus, into the bulky warm shame of morphing: fish/human/insect/image. Her refusal to mystify, and her profound intelligence, are reasons to praise, to sing praise, to shout praise.
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, painter Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)
Publishers Weekly (1/1/2016 12:00:00 AM) Hickman (This Is the Homeland) fluidly melds poetry and prose in a collection crafted with an essayist's narrative certainty and a poet's dreamlike images and nonlinear sense of time. Though many of the James Laughlin Award-winning collection's poems find their starting points in art, they go beyond the ekphrastic, blending together the writer's response to a given work as well as biographical details and interviews about the piece and its artist.
Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) In Mary Hickman's Rayfish, the body is both indescribable and described, both inescapable and mortal: Soutine attempts to keep the color of his first carcasses fresh with buckets of blood, but also Anna is high in the air, higher than most men can leap. Her right knee folds beneath her even as her left thigh, ankle, and toes extend, pressed behind into darkness. In these poems
essays? but if they are essays, they're the most musical, and most poetically focused, essays I've ever read
the body is the source of the world in which the body suffers. And in this way, Rayfish ultimately tells a necessary story of America right now, an America attempting to overcome its hatred of the many different bodies of which it is made.
Shane McCrae, author of In the Language of My Captor Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM) As a painter, I am utterly grateful for this book. To read these deceptively intimate texts is to learn how materials mean: a skin exchange with death, under fluorescent lights, in sterile conditions. In this encounter, touch heals and fouls; to look is to violate. We art-makers need language for process, for self-critique, for the thrilling backbend that is still at stake in the postmortem of Formalism or Process-Based art or Institutional Critique. What are we doing in our studios? Hickman folds multiple voices, of critic, maker, and maybe the ancient Greek chorus, into the bulky warm shame of morphing: fish/human/insect/image. Her refusal to mystify, and her profound intelligence, are reasons to praise, to sing praise, to shout praise.
Molly Zuckerman-Hartung, painter Publishers Weekly (1/1/2017 12:00:00 AM)