The Water Books

by Judith Vollmer

Overview

Judith Vollmer's The Water Books does a stunning job of blending natural images within an urbane setting. Whether it be Pittsburgh, a bus, a phone conversation Vollmer's attention to detail is unparalleled.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781932870541
Publisher:	Autumn House Press
Publication date:	01/01/2012
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	72
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.30(d)

About the Author

JUDITH VOLLMER'S previous collections have received the Brittingham, the Center for Book Arts, and the Cleveland State publication prizes. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts. Her essays and reviews are included in The Cambridge Companion to Baudelaire and elsewhere. She teaches at the University of Pittsburgh at Greensburg and in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry and Poetry in Translation, and is a founding editor of the literary journal 5 AM.

What People are Saying About This

Anne Waldman

The Water Booksis a remarkable achievement for its tough wit and shimmering beauties. Vollmer is both guardian and scribe, with a naturalist’s sharp-eyed ethos that snakes through watery realms, clear up to the Northern Lights and down to her own “fire-rings’ topaz and saffron stars.”As above so below. Her Rome and Pittsburgh meet as vivid—equally adored—parallel gem-lines in a magnanimous space. She kindles a bonfire for Pasolini and calls out hunter Cheney (“O great black mask of death”) with a Keatsian capability. These poems are feats of a heightened, familial, and adhesive consciousness, very good news for us all.

Editorial Reviews

In the poems of her new collection, Vollmer seeks connections to her Pennsylvania homeland (“Rocks in human-like shapes lift their knees/ in the shallows, getting a taste of lunar light”), imagines life in far-flung places in poems of travel, especially to Italy (“If I really owned this land/ I would like to lie down on it through thirty seasons”), and thinks hard about women—their bodies, their mortality, their love. Often she writes poems that stretch several pages and in varied stanzas and lines, as though tracing different kinds of thoughts. Travel becomes not a means of escape but a way of contemplating the possibilities of where one is and what one can accomplish: “if you have to you can fly across the United States/ on a plane made of two aluminum panels, the movement/ of your own body, & a small engine you can/ cut or start as needed.” Inevitable loss—of loved ones, places, time—has its advantages, these poems attest, as in one prose poem about luggage gone missing: “‘Are you suffering? Isn’t it good to lose a little baggage?” (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

“In Judith Vollmer’s fourth collection, The Water Books, water pours, flows, holds and is held in at least one third of the volume, which contains seventy pages of poems. Water slips through spaces unboundaried, privileged in this way that the short life spans of gnats and humans are not. As river, it gives home to otters, gets polluted through what wrongly enters it, serves as ‘death-trap water knots’ for swimmers and rafters unaware, and offers a place to walk into and be sanctified. As wetland, estuary, bubbling spring, and aquifer, water cleanses, and interfaces between river and sea. In cisterns buried beneath dirt and rubble accumulated through centuries over ancient cities, water endures, still cool.”—Susan Shaw Sailer, Cerise Press

From the Publisher