Text(Isles) by Nancy Kassell Poems Paperback Book Poetry Collection

Poetry. "Nancy Kassell's new (and first) collection TEXT(ISLES) is mature, humane, truly learned. The poems, unique, accurate, beautiful, are a model of emotional intelligence. Their context is as multidimensional as life and history itself. They evoke the classical world—Horace, Ovid, Aeneas, myth revisited; they introduce a woman-friendly world especially in their focus on the significance and language of cloth, of sewing, of pattern and texture; they 'translate' music (Brahms, Bach), painting (Klee, Soutine), art history; they explore sky, earth, water, cellular life; they evoke the centrality of love. Like the title, the poems fragment and reconcile the worlds they create. Myth and metaphor and 'reality' are interchangeable—and fresh. 'It is no news,/ that we have to reinvent ourselves/ again and again./ Unless we've already given up,/ the light over the drawing board/ is always on.' There is reassurance in the scope and beauty of TEXT(ISLES), hope in its minutest details."—Sondra Zeidenstein

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