Noon (New American Poetry) by Cole Swensen


Noon (New American Poetry)
Title : Noon (New American Poetry)
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 1557132879
ISBN-10 : 9781557132871
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 96
Publication : First published September 1, 1998

First published in 1997 by Sun & Moon Press, Noon was chosen by Rae Armantrout as the 2000 winner of the Gertrude Stein Award (formerly known as the New American Poetry Series Awards), an annual competition. Swensen’s Noon is a stunning meditative mix of lyrical and prosaic poetry in constant motion.

Noon (New American Poetry) Reviews

  • S P

    "When you wake up from a hypnogogic state
    because a sound in a dark room and you can't place
    the room and you think of every room you've ever
    known and it is not this room."

    —Signature

  • Laura

    this book is amazing, has quickly become one of my favorites and i must own it (i currently have a copy from loyola's library). she travels fluidly between line break and paragraph format and, while doing so, shows clearly with language the reason for the choice. her language is basic and brilliant, for instance "what would you do with a million throats..." is the one that seemed like it made my heart stop today, or my life. but there are a million of them in there and i want it perpetually to be "noon", i'm going to study this book like a bible.

  • Cail Judy

    Like slipping into a waking dream, where rooms become fields, the bottom of rivers, bridges and crows in the sky.

  • Katie

    I've been reading a lot of the 90s master poets recently, and these poems (Swensen in general) have a refreshing shape and voice. The form is loose and playful while seeming intentional, which I find rare. I didn't always feel as confident in the content--series that didn't seem to build much on each other, obsessions that get repetitive, and a reliance on some kind of outside reference, usually scientific ideas(as she depends on art in other collections).

  • Kent

    Easily, of the Swensen I have read, this is my favorite. Each of these 9-part poems have a way of touching images from previous poems to tie the book together, while intensely complicating the idea, say, of identity, when it's compared to a burst of crows flying into a sky. And yet those birds before was merely a hand shifted to resemble a bird.

  • Jonathan

    It's the kind of poetry I should like, yet I often find it a little dull. I keep returning to it to find if it has improved. "Thought Experiment" is based on Einsteinian relativity; it's thought-provoking. I also like the concept behind "How Photography has Changed the Human Face."

  • Gary McDowell

    Prose poems?!