Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door 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

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Standing Water: Poems

Standing Water: Poems

Chai, Eleanor

Paperback

General Poetry

Publisher Price: $18.00

ISBN10: 0374536864
ISBN13: 9780374536862
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: Apr 4 2017
Pages: 112
Weight: 0.30
Height: 0.40 Width: 5.20 Depth: 8.00
Language: English

A profound literary debut that recounts a child's singular story

Since I made you, you may

imagine I set myself on fire--
or better, say: you lit the funeral pyre
from ten thousand days away.

A young woman in Paris encounters an uncanny presence on a tour of a small museum. A study by Rodin of the dancer Little Hanako--titled Head of Sorrow--triggers in the young woman recognition of her mother, a mother erased from her life since childhood.

Thus begins Eleanor Chai's Standing Water, one of the most remarkable first books of poetry in recent years. It is a journey into the past as well as the present--into the narrative hidden from the poet since birth, as well as the strategies that she has adopted to survive. It is a journey about how we learn to cope with, to perceive and describe, the world. It is a story about savage privilege and deprivation.

Haunting the whole is the figure of the real Little Hanako--Rodin's model, a Japanese artist displaced in Europe, the medium through which other artists dream and discover the world.

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