Customer Reviews (8)

the best!
It's always interesting when people either love or hate something, where there's no middle ground. And in art, often people hate things because it doesn't fit their idea of what art is, which is based on that which they've seen before. I can't bear much poetry and love Lynn Emanuel's work for precisely that reason: it's not like anything else. Her voice, her format is her own--sharp, clear, and funny--you laugh because she has hit the mark so perfectly.

well done
Lynn Emmanuel provides poetry not of self indulgence but simply of self in these two collections of poems.Her voice is strong, confident yet avoids the pitfalls of seeing meaning where there is none.That combined with the exacting but rich vocabulary make this collection one of my favorites to read, reread, and recommend to others.

Shaping a world
Lynn Emanuel's work in this combined collection isfresh and daring.It isn't surprising that some readers find it off-putting to encounter an entirely confident voice that doesn't beg a reader's approval but marcheson with the keen intellect, humor, sharp and engaging characters andstories. Additionally Emanuel's imagery challenges and re-dresses the oldcherry blossoms of verse.

Shaping a world
Lynn Emanuel's work in this combined collection isfresh and daring.It isn't surprising that some readers find it off-putting to encounter an entirely confident voice that doesn't beg a reader's approval but marcheson with the keen intellect, humor, sharp and engaging characters andstories and imagery that challenges the old cherry blossoms of verse.

Extremely enjoyable and sophisticated
Emanuel is a terrifically strong writer, one America's best young mainstream poets, and this two-in-one volume holds up to -- and deserves -- close and repeated readings.The people who have given this booksophmoric, thoughtless one-star reviews are probably as pretentious andlacking in subtley as their comments. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Dark and wonderful
This is fine poetry, though its not your light and airy stuff.If your serious about contemporary poetry check out Lynn Emmanuel. ... Read more

Product Description
Pulverizing Portraits provides the first book-length study of contemporary American poet Lynn Emanuel. Emanuel's poetry is significant because it situates itself in relation to current debates about the state of poetry, creative writing in the academia, and the importance of drawing on interdisciplinary approaches to poetry via visual aesthe-tics, poststructuralist literary and theoretical perspectives, and philosophy. Camelia Elias takes a look at what characterizes contemporary American prose poetry, namely an intensified awareness of being close to something. Poets such as Lynn Emanuel have been increasingly concerned with poetry as a tool for cultural criticism which constantly redefines our poetic discourse. Elias traces the power of Emanuel's writing and looks at her subtleties in combining intrinsic and formal constraints in poetry with extrinsic and socio-historical methodologies. Elias's analyses of Emanuel's poetic genius culminate in a plethora of references which bring together painters, philosophers, poets, critics, and actors. Thus, the poet's father, the painter Akiba Emanuel, meets Giorgio Agamben, Charles Simic, Gertrude Stein, and Sharon Stone. They all contribute to voicing the world's "interminable speeches." ... Read more

Product Description
A reader and a writer don their respective roles andembark on the journey of a book. This is their story--ultimately alove story--darkly funny, mournful, testy. It is about a reader who attimes presides over the page like a god, and at others follows theleash of the author's voice through the dark streets of the book likea dog, and it is about a writer of determined slipperiness.As weread, we think that each of us is The Reader, the one who knows theReal Story. But the more we think we understand, the more the storymoves away from us-all is not what it seems.

This eagerly awaited third volume by the poet whose work The New YorkTimes described as "at once charmed and frightening" is a book ofhigh-spirited subversiveness, a work of argument, seduction, and arelentless devotion to language. Then, Suddenly-- bristles with thewound of the author's voice--insistent, vital, hilarious, andiconoclastic--tearing away at the confinement of the page and at thedistance between the page and the reader. Emanuel's images aredazzling. She creates a performance that is fearsome and funny in itsportrayal of the argument between the work of the text and the worldof the body. The Gettsburg Review has called her a writer of"exquisite craftsmanship" who can "strike from language . . . imageschiseled clean as bas-relief." Then, Suddenly-- is a book of spectacleand verve, part elegy, part vaudeville. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (3)

Poet Thinks Too Much
I saw some wonderful cagy things going on in Emanuel's first two books.But now comes THEN, SUDDENLY, which deconstructs itself word by word as it goes along, and in a very transparent manner.(The everyperson's answer toJorie Graham will have to wait.) THEN, TO TOP IT ALL OFF the poems areflat.The life seems to have been revised right out of them."Whenthe reader's radar tracked me down" Emanuel writes.What happened? The answer is, You thought about it too much and the result is stiff,self-conscious poetry.

Great Book!
"~Glad to see someone else (and Kevin Canty, no less) thinks this book is good.I read the first stanza and immediately knew it was for keeps.It's a book of poems about a book of poems, about an author of abook of poems, about the aboutness of an author making a book ofpoems."~ happen up front, center stage.

the bomb
An amazing book of poems, or a book of amazing poems, or both. The bongo-madness rhythms of the voice linger in your head after you put the book down. Serious without being solemn, playful without being silly. Iread this book first time through in a single sitting, and when I was doneI knew that I had started somewhere and ended up somewhere else, though theprecise names for either place eluded me. A very interesting, very smart,very pleasurable book. ... Read more

Product Description
The nineteenth volume of an esteemed series includes more than sixty selections of poetry, essays, and short stories chosen from thousands of nominations and representing the best in American literature from the small presses of today. Original. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Pushcarts are touch and go
For the most part Pushcarts are good reads.There are a few inclusions that do not deserve inclusion.THis is the case regardless of the year.

You ought to be ashamed
The Pushcart Prize is the most wonderful and rewarding annual anthology out there because, for one thing, it's the most fair--as Bill Henderson says in his introduction, there's no money here.You don't have to havewritten a bestseller or be in with the "New Yorker" crowd inorder to be published here. All you have to do is be a good writer.Hereis fiction and poetry at its rawest and purest form, from writers who writefor the sake of writing, for the sheer love of it.This is a noblething. ... Read more

Product Description
Word count: 695. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (5)

Fantastic.
Lynn Emanuel, Hotel Fiesta (University of Georgia, 1984)

I've been a fan of Lynn Emanuel's for coming up on two decades now. So when I stumbled upon this early release in a Half Price Books a few weeks back, I was ecstatic. It was everything I expected it to be-- obsessive over detail, witty, pleasantly surprising on a regular basis. Lynn Emanuel, folks, is good stuff.

"If his face were halved by shadow I would know
This was a street where an EATS sign trembled
And a Greek served coffee black as a dog's eye. "
(--"Inventing Father in Las Vegas")

Definitely worth grabbing, if you see it. **** ½

Exquisite
This is an amazing early collection from one of our major poets.The diction is elegant, the images, startling, and the persona world-weary, brassy, and vulnerable all at once.I want to live in these poems.

hotel fiesta
hotel fiesta is composed primarily of free verse personal narrative poetry. Much of it deals with a recurring character's adolescence and early adulthood. While the poetry is beautifully descriptive, and describesprecisely situations and scenes, the words themselves are not aurallybeautiful--to me even it almost seems like creative prose with line breaks.

A fantastic archeology of sin & soul...
This is one of my favorite poetry books of all times. It is sensuous, exact, full of truth and daring honesty. The language pours like streaming sunlight into the dark of a most interesting life. I doubt if Emmanuel canever top this one! Where do you go from here? It's jazzy & acutelymoving...

REPUGNANT AT ALL LEVELS!
I have survived the reading of Hotel Fiesta by Lynn Emanuel I can't believe the sub-standard poetics employed by her in this book. Can American poetry survive after being afflicted by Hotel Fiesta? ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on June 22, 1994. The length of the article is 323 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Film noir: train trip out of metropolis. (Poem)
Author: Lynn Emanuel
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 1994
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: v52Issue: n3Page: p495(1)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
This digital document is an article from The Antioch Review, published by Antioch Review, Inc. on June 22, 1994. The length of the article is 699 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: Film noir: at the Ritz. (Poem)
Author: Lynn Emanuel
Publication: The Antioch Review (Refereed)
Date: June 22, 1994
Publisher: Antioch Review, Inc.
Volume: v52Issue: n3Page: p496(2)

Distributed by Thomson Gale ... Read more

Product Description
Collected works of poetry and short stories published by Bucknell University. ... Read more