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Awful Gestures
By Adrienne Weiss
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I know how furiously your heart is beating.
— Wallace Stevens
Wallace Stevens' torrid words serve as both epigraph and incantation for Adrienne Weiss's powerful debut collection. Like Stevens, the poet acts as an intuitive observer and an almost violently acute mystic throughout these extravagant poems.
Awful Gestures is a true collision of technical expertise and grace. It is a classically lyrical, deeply subjective examination of the randomness of beauty from a voice sharpened against the edges of love, fear and yearning.
Although the poems are largely consecrated in the everyday, their themes transcend the barriers of place. In Awful Gestures, the poet references a strange, scintillant gallery of things and images, the "glitter and waste" from the sacred to the profane — from an aquamarine dress and a cavalier bartender, to the ruins of romance and a horrific revelation at the Anne Frankhuis.
This gorgeous collection offers a world as seen through the eyes of Rhiannon, the Celtic goddess of the underworld, interpreted by Stevie Nicks, and imagined in turn by the ultra-contemporary Weiss, an ingénue whose heart beats furiously, jets of wise blood.
Read more about Adrienne Weiss »
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Poetry ·
Canada $9.95 · US $7.95 · UK £4.95 ·
Trade paperback
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1-894663-12-8
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60 pages
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5 1/4" x 8 1/4"
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Insomniac Press
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