Waterwork,Used

Product DescriptionPoetry. 'In five stunning sequences, Sarah Riggs has created a poetics of elastic migrations that imagines the world as clusters, skeins, and motions whose innate peril is miraculously saved in hte act of naming: 'each name for a thing seems intent to curl from its shelled meaning.' Places, histories, persons, myth and object, intimacy and incident, are precision shorelines of simultaneous apprehension and erasure. In this subtle and luminous first book, Sarah Riggs has engaged our most fundamental quandaries in a poetry that announces, in Stevens' phrase, 'a new knowledge of reality.''Ann Lauterbach. '[Riggs] turns her acute eye to contemporary culture as well as natural history and her ear to the subtle balances of rhythm and assonance. The result is a beautiful attention that illuminates nuance, making the everyday world more detailed and thus more grand'Cole Swensen.ReviewIn five stunning sequences, Sarah Riggs has created a poetics of elastic migrations that imagines the world as clusters, skeins, and motions whose innate peril is miraculously saved in the act of naming: ''each name for a thing seems intent to curl from its shelled meaning.'' Places, histories, persons, myth and object, intimacy and incident, are precision shorelines of simultaneous apprehension and erasure. In this subtle and luminous first book, Sarah Riggs has engaged our most fundamental quandaries in a poetry that announces, in Stevens' phrase, ''a new knowledge of reality. Ann LauterbachWaterwork works in both senses of the word: all its intricate parts are moving smoothly in sync, and it succeeds. Such productive ambiguity rules the whole collection, which takes water and language as primary, parallel media, in the sense of growth media, in which all sorts of fascinating things can be cultured. In Riggs' case, they re all unprecedented hybrids of science and sound. She turns her acute eye to contemporary culture as well as natural history and her ear to the subtle balances of rhythm and assonance. The result is a beautiful attention that illuminates nuance, making the everyday world more detailed and thus more grand. Cole SwensenAbout the AuthorSarah Riggs lives in Paris and is a poet, translator, and visual artist with three other volumes of poetry: Waterwork (Chax Press, USA), 28 tlgrammes and 60 textos (ditions de l'Attente, tr. Franoise Valry, France). She is also the author of Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, and O'Hara, published by Routledge in 2002. The installation of her drawings, Isibilits, in collaboration with sound, video and cuisine, took place at the galerie of in autumn 2007. Member of Double Change, and director of Tamaas, she has taught at Columbia University in Paris, and with Omar Berrada has translated Marie Borel's Wolftrot (La Presse, 2006). Forthcoming in 2008 are her translations of Isabelle Garron, Face Before Against (Litmus) and Ryoko Sekiguchi Two Markets, Once Again (Post Apollo).