Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The Green Tuxedo

The Green Tuxedo

Holmes, Janet

Paperback

Series: Ernst Sandeen Prize in Poetry, Book 1999

Literary CriticismGeneral Poetry

ISBN10: 0268010366
ISBN13: 9780268010362
Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
Published: Jan 4 1998
Pages: 70
Weight: 0.28
Height: 0.26 Width: 6.08 Depth: 9.03
Language: English

Janet Holmes's second book of poems explores and interrogates the quotidian life of the late twentieth century for what exists behind its often seductive appearance. In these poems we see beneath acceptable, sleek surfaces into the turbulence they often conceal, as the splendid green tuxedo of the title may disguise a heart that harbors racism, fear, and violence. Holmes exhorts us to look beyond the face value of what presents itself, to resist literal interpretations, and to plumb the many depths afforded by each encounter with the world outside ourselves. In the second half of The Green Tuxedo, Holmes draws on recently discovered diaries kept by her journalist father nearly fifty years before her birth. Sifting through evidence and memory, she entwines actual diary entries (such as a seventy-seven-name list of Wild Women I Have Known) with speculation and invention to generate a portrait that discovers him- re-invents him-as a young man. This sequence, searching and elegiac, affords closure to a book whose questionings suggest less a need for absolute answers than a declaration of the need to explore. Holmes leads us through a world of appearances, celebrating the necessary examination of what is concealed.

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