|
Winner of the 2006 Lenore Marshall Prize for the year's most outstanding book of poetry
Praise for The Mystery of Meteors: "The latest collection from National Book Award nominee Eleanor Lerman...examines the ways that knowledge is transmitted, translated, and applied....The poems in this collection are neither oblique, nor theoretical, relying on lived experience for their emotional subject....Lerman offers readers a world of unironic optimism, beautiful congruence, and a distinct voice that many are grateful to hear again." —ForeWord Magazine
"This is not only a book but also an event: the first poetry collection from Lerman in a quarter-century....Her return dazzles, with poems that seem not so much written as conjured...."
—Kansas City Star
Visit Eleanor Lerman's homepage. Eleanor Lerman, whose last collection, The Mystery of Meteors, was named by Library Journal as "Best of Poetry, 2001," returns with a dazzling, funny, and seriously mature new book. In Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds, Lerman boldly wrests contemporary mysticism from a hardknock New York Jewish consciousness. She finds evidence of a larger vision everywhere—in Roswell, bondage clubs, broken-down beach club bars, in a walk with her dog along the shore. She's a solid witness to the sixties: Cold War, Vietnam, sexual revolution, drugs. However, in her favor, she's traveled through Baby Boomer irony, bought the tee shirt, and somehow found her way back. The love poems of her early books, the ones that made her famous, have returned in earnest. They retain their exuberant play, now tempered with a marvelous, sweet identification with post-Soviet Russian women in particular, and post-Soviet Russia in general. Lerman's new work is warm, inclusive, and diverse. In spite of past failure and heartbreak, her wonderful new book is full of lightness, humor, acceptance, and hope.
Eleanor Lerman is the author of The Mystery of Meteors (Sarabande Books, 2001). She was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1952. She is the author of two other previous books of poetry, published over thirty years ago, Armed Love (Wesleyan University Press) and Come the Sweet By and By (University of Massachusetts Press). After an early, aborted career as a cultural icon (in 1975, The New York Times called Armed Love "X-Rated" when that was still shocking), she fled the field of art for comedy. She transitioned to true-life crime, working on books with her brother (No Mercy and Public Enemies by John Walsh with Philip Lerman). She has been nominated for a National Book Award, received the inaugural Juniper Prize, and was the recipient of a fiction grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She is a lifelong New Yorker.
|
