|
Poetry Collections
by Gillian Conoley
Woman Speaking Inside
Film Noir
/
Some Gangster Pain
/
Tall Stranger
/
Beckon
/
Lovers in the Used World /
Profane Halo
* *
* * *
Gillian Conoley -- born in
1955 in Taylor, Texas, where she grew
up, -- has since lived in Massachusetts,
Madrid, and New Orleans. Her poems have
appeared in the The American Poetry
Review, Ploughshares, The
North American Review, and numerous
other magazines around the country.
Conoley taught at the University of New
Orleans. Some Gangster Pain is
her first full-length collection of
poetry.
* *
* * *
Reviews
Some Gangster Pain
Panache, bravery, resilience: these are
Gillian Conoley's true colors. From the
invention of Texas, her native native,
to inventing a friend, she looks from a
glass-bottomed boat at the fabulous
underworld most of us overlook. If we go
along there's a chance we'll learn to
see through some gangster pain the
particular lives, not so much distorted
as transformed, made bearable,
beautiful, and finally her own.—Madeline
DeFrees
It is
hard to give a sense, without quotin, of
what these powerfully compressed poems
are like. The words they are made of are
our durable everyday ones, but so
compacted, so impatient of syntax, that
haloes of strangeness and mystery are
generated around the short sentences,
which are sometimes abrupt as gunfire.
Emotions are coded in terms of what we
experience physically: of rustling nylon
and lipsticked cigarettes, of suicide
kings and one-eyed jacks, of strawberry
roan and appalousa, of the prickly wind
of Texas--never such things for their
own sake, but as keys to the secret
meanings of a passionate existence.—John
Frederick Nims
* *
* * *
Reviews of Other Conoley Poetry
Collections
Tall Stranger:
Poems
This is a tidy collection of twenty-five
poems, all finely honed and rich with
the slowness of a dead afternoon. The
landscape is Texas, some farms, and a
town or two in Arkansas. The music is
country and western on a small dark
radio. The time is often the 1960s, and
if not the 1960s, then it's the small
town feel of the sixties, before the
world got ugly. Conoley writes about
family, place, and the everyday
heartache of not getting enough. Her
writing, in fact, is a lean version of
The Last Picture Sbow, where a juke box
is playing and Cokes are nursed.
Loneliness begins on porchsteps and ends
in seedy bars, where love is that man
with his elbows on a rickety table.
There is a deliberate attention to the
odd graces of her characters. Conoley
sums up her Aunt Alma and the homecoming
queen with the three "runner-ups." Her
people wear jeans and aprons, and when
they dance, dust is kicked up from
floorboards and there is a delightfully
honest twang in Conoley's poetry.—Publisher
* *
* * *
Lovers in the Used World
|
While
singularly up-to-date in
their topics gas stations,
stars, urban centers,
"deep-fried... catfish,"
"teenagers" who "xerox/
genitalia" the poems in
Conoley's fifth volume come
dangerously close to their
apparent model: Jorie
Graham's oeuvre. Beyond some
high-low pastiche, Conoley's
real subjects are those
Graham's style, on constant
display here, seems to
involuntarily bring forth;
the fragmentary phrases,
double-spaced long lines and
phrase-long
self-questionings here
result in abstract
speculations ("the almost
seen/ luminous circle
breaking to parenthesis")
that raise problems about
beauty, "system" and chaos,
embodiment and relation, God
and God's absence from the
phenomenal world. Alcibiades
and Socrates each get a
poem, or part of a poem, to
themselves.
A few relatively
compact poems ("The
Masters," "Flute Girl") are
unqualified successes,
drawing out Conoley's own
uneasy sparkle and shine. |
 |
The rest of the book owes far too much
to Graham, whose mannerisms though
suited to Conoley's big topics overwhelm
what Conoley has to say. Graham's method
of interweaving everyday actions with
empty philosophical queries ("What if
there is not enough nothing?" writes
Conoley), her attractively scattered
sentence fragments, her stentorian
openings ("That the transactions would
end"), her domesticated jump-cuts and
even distinctive props from Graham's
most famous poems (birds on a phone
line, for example) pervade so many of
Conoley's new poems that this book is
best read as respectful homage. (May)
Forecast: Conoley's previous books,
including Beckon (1996) and Some
Gangster Pain (1987), both from
Carnegie-Mellon, are well-known and
well-respected on the po-biz circuit, as
is the magazine of which Conoley is
founder and editor, Volt.
Poet-in-residence and associate
professor at Sonoma State University,
Conoley should reach the school-based
readership that has been waiting for
this title.—Publishers
Weekly
* *
* * *
Profane
Halo
Exuberant and challenging, the quick
cuts and vibrant, freestanding images in
Conoley's fifth volume let her see
America from many sides and in all sorts
of scales, from the ground level of
coastal suburbs to the grand cycles of
political history. "Dear Sunset that was
sun of now/ Near Greatness, dear tongue
my Queen dear rock solid," the title
poem asks, "how could we know that we
are forerunners?" There follows a series
of verbally brilliant, sometimes
strikingly fragmentary poems, some
perhaps inspired by photographs; Conoley
lights up American spaces and persons
past and present, embedding quotes from
poetic luminaries (Dickinson, Zukofsky)
and showing a slant toward the Pacific
coast, where "California floats its
prisons in the sea." Conoley (Beckon),
who teaches at Sonoma State, also runs
the hip poetry journal Volt; if her last
book took much (perhaps too much) from
Jorie Graham, this one recalls such
peers as Brenda Hillman and Claudia
Keelan. Though sometimes scattered, even
chaotic, Conoley's odes and dithyrambs
convey remarkable emotion, from joy
("ecstatic the sparrows/ in bursts in
trees/ above the Western American
fence") to whimsy to disorienting pain
("Night wounds, let me introduce you/ to
the day wounds"). This is a strong
mid-career book with plenty to recommend
itself in terms of condensed
macropolitics and felt regionalism. But
coming so soon after superficially
similar volumes from Keelan (The
Devotion Field) and Eleni Sikelianos
(The California Poem), Conoley's project
may not get the oxygen it needs.—Publishers
Weekly * *
* * * Gillian Conoley—the recipient of several Pushcart Prizes and
the Jerome J. Shestack Award from The American Poetry Review—is Poet-in-Residence and Associate Professor at Sonoma State
University, where she is the founder and editor of Volt
magazine. Conoley is the author of four poetry
collections, including the highly praised Some Gangster
Pain and Tall Stranger.
Conoley's poetry has appeared in the American
Poetry Review, the Kenyon Review, Ironwood, Zyzzyva,
Ploughshares, the Denver Quarterly, the Missouri Review and
other publications.
Her honors and awards include four Pushcart
Prize publications, the Academy of American Poets Award, a
fellowship from the Washington State Arts Commission, residency at
the MacDowell Colony and a grant from Northwest Institute for
Advanced Study.
Conoley's work has been anthologized in
"Best American Poetry," "Poets of the
Northwest," "The Carnegie-Mellon Anthology of
Poetry," "American Poetry Annual" and "Jazz
Poetry Anthology."
Conoley has taught literature and poetry at several
universities. She also has worked as a curator, a literary
editor and a professional journalist. The
American Book Review says of
Conoley's poetry: "Even above the
powerfully inventive language and clear,
compressed style is a poetic vision that
seems utterly transforming. These are
poems born of Flannery O'Connor's short
stories, with their oddball grace, their
undeniable redemption. Combined with
Gillian Conoley's dark humor are an eye
for detail and a sensibility that are
mysteriously compelling. Her characters
discover the power of the transforming
image and in so doing create an inner
life that is rich, surprising,
transcendent. It is this odd
hopefulness, this recourse to the
imagination which transforms the
landscape of ordinary lives and longing
into something rare, mysterious, and
dangerous that are Conoley's special
talent."
|
Greenback Planet: How the Dollar Conquered
the World and Threatened Civilization as We Know It
By H. W. Brands
In Greenback Planet, acclaimed historian H. W. Brands charts the dollar's astonishing rise to become the world's principal currency. Telling the story with the verve of a novelist, he recounts key episodes in U.S. monetary history, from the Civil War debate over fiat money (greenbacks) to the recent worldwide financial crisis. Brands explores the dollar's changing relations to gold and silver and to other currencies and cogently explains how America's economic might made the dollar the fundamental standard of value in world finance. He vividly describes the 1869 Black Friday attempt to corner the gold market, banker J. P. Morgan's bailout of the U.S. treasury, the creation of the Federal Reserve, and President Franklin Roosevelt's handling of the bank panic of 1933. Brands shows how lessons learned (and not learned) in the Great Depression have influenced subsequent U.S. monetary policy, and how the dollar's dominance helped transform economies in countries ranging from Germany and Japan after World War II to Russia and China today. He concludes with a sobering dissection of the 2008 world financial debacle, which exposed the power--and the enormous risks--of the dollar's worldwide reign. The Economy |
 |
* *
* * *
|
|
Sex at the Margins
Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry
By Laura María Agustín
This book explodes several myths: that selling sex is completely different from any other kind of work, that migrants who sell sex are passive victims and that the multitude of people out to save them are without self-interest. Laura Agustín makes a passionate case against these stereotypes, arguing that the label 'trafficked' does not accurately describe migrants' lives and that the 'rescue industry' serves to disempower them. Based on extensive research amongst both migrants who sell sex and social helpers, Sex at the Margins provides a radically different analysis. Frequently, says Agustin, migrants make rational choices to travel and work in the sex industry, and although they are treated like a marginalised group they form part of the dynamic global economy. Both powerful and controversial, this book is essential reading for all those who want to understand the increasingly important relationship between sex markets, migration and the desire for social justice. "Sex at the Margins rips apart distinctions between migrants, service work and sexual labour and reveals the utter complexity of the contemporary sex industry. This book is set to be a trailblazer in the study of sexuality."—Lisa Adkins, University of London |
* * * * *
The White Masters of the
World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
* *
* * *
Ancient African Nations
* * * * *
If you like this page consider making a donation
* * * * *
Negro Digest /
Black World
Browse all issues
1950
1960
1965
1970
1975
1980
1985
1990
1995
2000
____ 2005
Enjoy!
* * * * *
The Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for
Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
* *
* * *
The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding of
Haiti
* * * * *
* *
* * *
update 22 November 2011
|
