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Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
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Home > Book Accessories > Book Tassels > Item 105
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Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
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by Kathleen Flenniken
Sales Rank: 584744
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List Price: $17.95
$14.54
At Amazon
on 12-27-2008
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Paperback: 76 pages
Publisher: Bison Books September 1, 2006
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0803269242
ISBN-13: 978-0803269248
Product Dimensions:
8.3 x 5.3 x 0.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 4 ounces
From Publishers Weekly
Flenniken's understated debut, winner of the Prarie Schooner Book Prize, weaves together two seemingly antithetical themes: the comic indignations and attractions of minor celebrities, and the everyday joys and sorrows of family life. A love of plainspoken language informs these ironically modest, lines: "I'm no smarter than Miss Scarlet in her// tawdry side-slit dress," she writes, assuming the voice of Colonel Mustard from the board game Clue. Later poems consider the lives of somewhat famous figures, such as story writer Shirley Jackson and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay; their troubles sit uneasily beside Flenniken's heartfelt portraits of her ailing, and now deceased, mother. Ordinariness-our need for it, and our frustrations with it-becomes Flenniken's signature subject: the quietest evenings "make you what you are." Flenniken sometimes errs on the side of modesty, making her speech consistently trustworthy but rarely elevated or exciting. She has fashioned a poetry comfortable with self-imposed limits: "Pray to the neighbor's dog," she urges, "who finally learned to live on a chain." She still finds herself searching after mysteries, in Board Games, novels, and her own life, lauding "this idea that you could step out of your life/ unafraid, with no worldly need but to find who done it."
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Product Review
Winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry "What emerges from the poems, taken as a group and as a loose narrative, is a familiar and mundane persona that could correspond to that of many middle-class American female poets [B]ut this life is, beautifully and completely, transformed into art [I]t is rare to come across a poet of familiar contemporary experience like Kathleen Flenniken, whose imaginative, convincing tropes, sense of rhythm and sound, sharp intellect, narrative instinct, and resistance to cliche transform that experience into art so compelling that it makes us wonder how have we come to doubt it could be done? That would take us back to the rest of the books Left on the Shelf. Given that Famous was among them, I will keep returning." Bloomsbury Review "There's a consistency of voice and diction in Famous that satisfies and a carefully rendered emotional core to the poems, which quietly surprises."--Stephen Dunn, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Different Hours "There's a winning surface modesty here: it isn't Abraham Lincoln who merits the poem, but his oft-maligned wife; not Edna St. Vincent Millay, but her stay-at-home husband; not the Taj Mahal, but the everyday International House of Pancakes. Still, in Flenniken's hands, these occasions rise toward urgent news--as when, in 'Shampoo,' the memory of a mother's declining health soulfully becomes one with the headline about a submarine's sinking--until the least most of us are transformed, poem by poem, into the famous."--Albert Goldbarth, author of Saving Lives and Budget Travel through Space and Time "Unpretentious, self-effacing, earthy, funny, and wise."--Peggy Shumaker, author of Blaze "Exploring the external trappings of contemporary life as well as the internal cadences of a mind that wants at once to be 'shocking and irresistible,' Kathleen Flenniken takes us into the slipstreams of fame, where our daily dramas play themselves out in the 'wild uncoded rhythms' of the imagination."--Judith Kitchen, author of The House on Eccles Road
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Famous (Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry)
Available from Amazon
Price: $14.54
Updated on 12-27-2008
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