as a "Best Book of the Year" by the Los Angeles Times and Booklist magazine, and winner of the Independent Publisher Book Award, Cool, Calm, and Collected is a tour de force from one of the nations premier poets.
For four decades, Carolyn Kizer has been one of the most influential, controversial, and recognizable figures in American poetry.
A feminist practically before the term existed, she has never been afraid to say what is on her mind, writing poems infused with sexual politics, social awareness, and literary irreverence.
Cool, Calm, and Collected was reprinted four times in cloth and became one of Copper Canyon Presss bestselling titles.
It features new poems, work from all of Kizers previous volumes, translations "from a dizzying number of poets" New York Times, and several prose pieces, including "Pakistan Journal" and "My Good Father.
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We women,
Outside, breathing dust, are still the Other,
The evening sun goes down time to fix dinner,
"You women have no major phiolosophers, " We know.
But we remain philosophic, and say with the Saint,
"Let me enter my chamber and sing my songs of love.
"
from "Pro Femina"
"We cannot do without Kizer and never couldhere are four decades of compelling reasons why.
"Los Angeles Times
"Carolyn Kizer is a national treasure, "San Francisco Chronicle
"The book will appeal to poetry lovers and activists of all stripes.
"Publishers Weekly
"No library should be without this collection, "Booklist starred review
Carolyn Kizer, recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, was educated at Sarah Lawrence College.
She cofounded Poetry Northwest served as the first director of the Literature Program at the National Endowment for the Arts was a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and has been a poetinresidence at Columbia, Stanford, and Princeton.
Kizer lives in Sonoma, California, An inspiration. Really reached me and expanded my thinking, Nice collection to revisit again another time, splendidly vigorous poetry, lots about what it's like to be woman One of the great poets of our time.
A large collection of the poets work that I have enjoyed reading over the past year, Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born inin Spokane, Washington, Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizers childhood was suffused with poetry, Of her development as a poet, she noted to the Poetry Society of America: “My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of John Keats mother went for Walt Whitman.
No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to, But I think my choices of Gertrude Stein and George Bernard Shaw show that my tastes were different.
I remember that when I was eleven or twelve I came storming home from school demanding, Why didnt you ever tell me about Alexander Pope and John Dryden They were stunned.
Our library, copious as it was, didnt Poet, essayist, and translator Carolyn Kizer was born inin Spokane, Washington.
Raised by a prominent lawyer and highly educated mother, Kizers childhood was suffused with poetry, Of her development as a poet, she noted to the Poetry Society of America: “My parents were both romantics: father favored the poems of John Keats mother went for Walt Whitman.
No evening of my childhood passed without my being read to, But I think my choices of Gertrude Stein and George Bernard Shaw show that my tastes were different.
I remember that when I was eleven or twelve I came storming home from school
demanding, Why didn't you ever tell me about Alexander Pope and John Dryden They were stunned.
Our library, copious as it was, didn't contain the works of either, These were lasting influences. I have continued to prefer, and write, poems that have what you might call a sting in the tail.
Add Catullus and Juvenal. I adored wit, irony, and intellectual precision, ” Kizers work is known for just those traits, From her early poems in The Ungrateful Gardento the Pulitzer prize winning Yin: New Poemsto such later works as Pro Femina, which satirizes liberated women writers by mimicking the hexameter used by the ancient misogynist poet Juvenal, and her retrospective Calm, Cool, and Collected: Poems, Kizers work has received acclaim for its intellectual rigor, formal mastery, and willingness to engage with political realities.
According to the San Francisco Chronicle, “Carolyn Kizer is a kind of institution For overyears, she's made poems with a stern work ethic of literary thought and linguistic scrupulousness.
” In an interview with Allan Jalon for the Los Angeles Times, Kizer described her own style: “Im not a formalist, not a confessional poet, not strictly a free verse poet.
” Jalon described Kizer as, “Tough without being cold, sometimes satirical shes a great admirer of Alexander Pope,” and noted that “her work expresses a worldly largeness that repeatedly focuses on the points at which lives meet.
Thats my subject,” concluded Kizer, “No matter how brief an encounter you have with anybody, you both change, ” sitelink.