University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-0-8229-8887-8 | Paper: 978-0-8229-6687-6
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living, Whirlwind, and Burn and Dodge, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of a prose memoir titled Hitchcock Blonde and two books of translation: Book of Minutes by Gemma Gorga and the prize-winning Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga. A 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize winner, and recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, she lives in New York City, where she teaches poetry workshops and is associate editor of Barrow Street Press.
REVIEWS
“Imperfect Present is a stunning book, not simply for its depth of feeling, piercing wit, and well-earned wisdom but also for the brilliant play of language, the sheer sonic pleasures of it. Whether meditations on art, mortality, social justice, what it means to be and do good, these are poems startling both in their range and clarity of vision—at once delighting and jolting the mind toward recognition and a new apprehension of the world we thought we knew. I am reminded that Sharon Dolin is a poet for our time whose necessary voice I return to again and again.” —Natasha Trethewey, former US poet laureate and author of Monument: Poems New and Selected
“There are many ways to describe Imperfect Present, Sharon Dolin’s new collection of poems—delightful, earthy, erudite, engaging—but dazzling says it best. A master of form, Dolin offers a prismatic, often intimate, look at origins: language, country, belief, the self. Though many poems take on our worst imperfections—hatred, violence, degradation of the planet—others make room for generosity, an embrace of our failings, ‘the shattered pieces of some inconceivable whole.’ Imperfect Present is a powerful inquiry into what it means to be human, living in our present moment. As Dolin asks, ‘even in the midst of sorrow how may I—we—still summon joy?’” —Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
“Sharon Dolin’s marvelous new collection, Imperfect Present, brings with it her profound lyric intelligence and elegant, eloquent wit. Her brilliantly charged language embodies those shifting tensions, those often mercurial, often intense reflections that accompany us along the paths and passages of a life. Compassionate and compelling, Dolin’s collection is, as its title suggests, truly the perfect book for our imperfect present moment.” —David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Make Your Home in the Imperfect Present
I: If I Told You
My Life in a Coffee Cup
If I Told You
Kafka’s Hands
How Many Secrets?
Ammonite
The Pangolin
8.3 Billion Metric Tons
Ode to Chufa
Passepartout
Ode to Pubic Hair
Black Leather Backpack
The Loneliness of His Death, the Death of His Loneliness
To Wait and to Hope
How Do I Fix the World
Courage!
II: Appearances
Self-Portrait as Corncrake
Midnight in Paris
Cinquains to Pablo
At the Fountain of the Fallen Angel in Retiro Park
Cancelled Letter to Antoni Gaudí
It Takes So Little
Evening Storms
Cinquains of Doubt
Innocence
Trilogy of Hands
Trilogy of Doubt
Doubtful
Doubtful Profile
Three-Quarter View
Trilogy of Death
Trilogy of Tears and Smiles
III: Oblique Strategies
Trust in the You of Now
Turn It Upside Down
Emphasize the Flaws
Only a Part, Not the Whole
The Most Important Is Most Easily Forgotten
Give Way to Your Worst Impulse
Accretion
Not Building a Wall but Making a Brick
Do We Need Holes?
Repetition Is a Form of Change
Do Nothing for as Long as Possible
Where’s the Edge?
Honor Thy Error as a Hidden Intention
Overtly Resist Change
Be Extravagant
Use Filters
Reverse
Don’t Break the Silence
IV: From the Dream Notebooks
My Life as an Open Air Temple
A Dream Is One-Sixtieth Part of Prophecy
I Have Dreamt a Dream and I Do Not Know What It Is
A Good Dream Should Be Kept in Mind so It Will Be Fulfilled
There Is No Dream Without Frivolity
All Dreams Follow the Mouth
A Dream That Has Not Been Interpreted Is Like a Letter That Has Not Been Read
It May Be Spring
The Water Where I Have Not Swum
Mitzvah at Gordon Beach
To the One Who Tames
To the Ram’s Horn I Cannot Sound
Two Stones
Notes
Acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022 eISBN: 978-0-8229-8887-8 Paper: 978-0-8229-6687-6
Imperfect Present is a book for our current moment. By confronting the urgencies of daily life, from questions of identity to sexual abuse to racial unrest to the ubiquity of plastic, these poems investigate ways to sustain ourselves in our fraught public and private lives. With her characteristic linguistic play, Sharon Dolin illuminates some of the most personal concerns that resonate throughout our culture and in ourselves, such as error, despair, uncertainty, and doubt. In sections that deploy the lens of art, the “Oblique Strategies” of Brian Eno and Peter Schmidt, and meditations on dreams and spirituality, Imperfect Present provides a panoply of approaches that grapple with the complexity of now.
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY Sharon Dolin is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Manual for Living, Whirlwind, and Burn and Dodge, winner of the AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. She is also the author of a prose memoir titled Hitchcock Blonde and two books of translation: Book of Minutes by Gemma Gorga and the prize-winning Late to the House of Words: Selected Poems by Gemma Gorga. A 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship recipient, Fulbright Scholar, Pushcart Prize winner, and recipient of a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, she lives in New York City, where she teaches poetry workshops and is associate editor of Barrow Street Press.
REVIEWS
“Imperfect Present is a stunning book, not simply for its depth of feeling, piercing wit, and well-earned wisdom but also for the brilliant play of language, the sheer sonic pleasures of it. Whether meditations on art, mortality, social justice, what it means to be and do good, these are poems startling both in their range and clarity of vision—at once delighting and jolting the mind toward recognition and a new apprehension of the world we thought we knew. I am reminded that Sharon Dolin is a poet for our time whose necessary voice I return to again and again.” —Natasha Trethewey, former US poet laureate and author of Monument: Poems New and Selected
“There are many ways to describe Imperfect Present, Sharon Dolin’s new collection of poems—delightful, earthy, erudite, engaging—but dazzling says it best. A master of form, Dolin offers a prismatic, often intimate, look at origins: language, country, belief, the self. Though many poems take on our worst imperfections—hatred, violence, degradation of the planet—others make room for generosity, an embrace of our failings, ‘the shattered pieces of some inconceivable whole.’ Imperfect Present is a powerful inquiry into what it means to be human, living in our present moment. As Dolin asks, ‘even in the midst of sorrow how may I—we—still summon joy?’” —Ellen Bass, author of Indigo
“Sharon Dolin’s marvelous new collection, Imperfect Present, brings with it her profound lyric intelligence and elegant, eloquent wit. Her brilliantly charged language embodies those shifting tensions, those often mercurial, often intense reflections that accompany us along the paths and passages of a life. Compassionate and compelling, Dolin’s collection is, as its title suggests, truly the perfect book for our imperfect present moment.” —David St. John, author of The Last Troubadour: New and Selected Poems
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
Make Your Home in the Imperfect Present
I: If I Told You
My Life in a Coffee Cup
If I Told You
Kafka’s Hands
How Many Secrets?
Ammonite
The Pangolin
8.3 Billion Metric Tons
Ode to Chufa
Passepartout
Ode to Pubic Hair
Black Leather Backpack
The Loneliness of His Death, the Death of His Loneliness
To Wait and to Hope
How Do I Fix the World
Courage!
II: Appearances
Self-Portrait as Corncrake
Midnight in Paris
Cinquains to Pablo
At the Fountain of the Fallen Angel in Retiro Park
Cancelled Letter to Antoni Gaudí
It Takes So Little
Evening Storms
Cinquains of Doubt
Innocence
Trilogy of Hands
Trilogy of Doubt
Doubtful
Doubtful Profile
Three-Quarter View
Trilogy of Death
Trilogy of Tears and Smiles
III: Oblique Strategies
Trust in the You of Now
Turn It Upside Down
Emphasize the Flaws
Only a Part, Not the Whole
The Most Important Is Most Easily Forgotten
Give Way to Your Worst Impulse
Accretion
Not Building a Wall but Making a Brick
Do We Need Holes?
Repetition Is a Form of Change
Do Nothing for as Long as Possible
Where’s the Edge?
Honor Thy Error as a Hidden Intention
Overtly Resist Change
Be Extravagant
Use Filters
Reverse
Don’t Break the Silence
IV: From the Dream Notebooks
My Life as an Open Air Temple
A Dream Is One-Sixtieth Part of Prophecy
I Have Dreamt a Dream and I Do Not Know What It Is
A Good Dream Should Be Kept in Mind so It Will Be Fulfilled
There Is No Dream Without Frivolity
All Dreams Follow the Mouth
A Dream That Has Not Been Interpreted Is Like a Letter That Has Not Been Read
It May Be Spring
The Water Where I Have Not Swum
Mitzvah at Gordon Beach
To the One Who Tames
To the Ram’s Horn I Cannot Sound
Two Stones
Notes
Acknowledgments
REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE
If you are a student who cannot use this book in printed form, BiblioVault may be able to supply you
with an electronic file for alternative access.
Please have the accessibility coordinator at your school fill out this form.
It can take 2-3 weeks for requests to be filled.
ABOUT THIS BOOK | AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY | REVIEWS | TOC | REQUEST ACCESSIBLE FILE