Transaction Histories
by Donna Stonecipher
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Pub Date Sep 10 2018 | Archive Date Sep 15 2018
University of Iowa Press | University Of Iowa Press
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Description
Reveling in the paradox of the formal prose poem, Donna Stonecipher’s Transaction Histories gathers together six series of poems that explore the disobedient incongruities of aesthetics and emotions. Stonecipher’s carefully sculpted forms and exacting language are held in tension with an unruly imagination to provoke a vision of experience densely layered with bodies impinging upon and altering each other, engaging in transactions that unfold in poetically complex and emotionally startling ways. By turns wry and melancholic, playful and acerbic, erotically charged and politically skeptical, Stonecipher’s poems marry a deeply felt lyricism to a fascination with the mechanisms of narrative. The result is akin to Roland Barthes’s notion of “the novelistic”: writing that flirts with the gestures and spaces of the novel without the trappings of plot, character, or action. Narrative fragments dart in and out of sight, spectral figures and motifs recur in fugal patterns, and habits of ruthless observation are brought to bear on the details of both intimate life and social organization.
Stonecipher lays claim to a stylistic achievement and vision that are entirely her own, transparent and elusive, casual in address and rigorous in design. Whether training its eye on fetishized polar bears, illegal garbage dumping, or ideological debates around rose chintz wallpaper, Transaction Histories tracks the fitful and tragicomic relationships that exist among objects, landscapes, texts, and people, and lays bare the ways in which our transactions keep our lives going.
Advance Praise
Previous praise for Donna Stonecipher's Model City:
“[A] highly affecting work of imagination and sensibility . . . one often feels afloat in a world concocted and dreamy, there and not there.”—Martha Ronk, The Constant Critic
“In the same way that architecture must abide by certain rules and regulations but can still create a thing of beauty, Stonecipher, by constraining herself to engineer within her own parameters, forms beautiful language and ideas.”—Hamzah M. Hussain, DURA
“How many poets are there in the world that you go looking for online, checking regularly, even impatiently, to see whether and when their new books will be out? Not many. Among the poets whose work I anxiously await, Donna Stonecipher has long been near the top of the list.”—Michael Thurston, Massachusetts Review
Available Editions
| EDITION | Other Format |
| ISBN | 9781609386023 |
| PRICE | $19.95 (USD) |
| PAGES | 102 |
Links
Featured Reviews
Joseph S, Reviewer
Transaction Histories by Donna Stonecipher is a series of six poems of several sections. Stonecipher is the author of three books of poems, most recently The Cosmopolitan (2008, winner of the National Poetry Series). She graduated from the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, with an MFA in 2001. She completed her Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing at the University of Georgia.
Transaction Histories delivers an exciting collection of observations and bits of news. The color blue and water in all its forms are present and run through the entire collection. The sea, rivers, snow, coastlines, and an infinity pool are all represented. Water is the ban of developers as nothing can be built on it. Later we are reminded of the plastic island in the Pacific the size of Texas, and it is countered with:
The plastic owls had been manufactured to scare away other
birds, as if wisdom itself were frightening — and indeed it was.
The language is crisp and filled with images:
In the photograph there were long rows of hooded horses, their eyes like great dark
romantic marbles glistening out into the unromantic crowds.
The images reflect back and forth through the poems and form connections to the past. Views change as a gardener, artist, and a veterinarian discuss the best places to live. This is countered later by travelers who arrive in a foreign city looking to eat and find the same selection of restaurants they had at home, except with the if one found one's self at a particular restaurant in India.
Time changes values of items:
Even as we sat watching the sunset, somewhere a lamp was turning into an antique somewhere a sofa was converting from bad taste to good taste.
It also changes what people value:
A lot of people seemed to like to go to the New York Public Library, establish themselves at a desk surrounded by books, and spend all afternoon stroking their smartphones.
Stonecipher takes the reader on a journey from Persian carpets, to the (loosely translated) Encyclopedia of Bad Taste, and Snow. Between each section is are two short poems call "Landscape" and "Portrait" which offer a view of art from the past and waste from the present. A stark contrast between the past and present. The past and present and people and things come together to compliment and contract each other. An enjoyable and thought-provoking collection of modern poetry.
Available September 10, 2018
