|
 
Poets
ACT Theatre, March
13, 2001
Biography
Selected Works
Links
Biography
Claudia Rankine’s poetry is a kind of high-wire act in which
the acrobat must invent the wire with each succeeding step. Alert to paradox,
in both her characters and language, she creates a world of beauty and
violence through breaking down the poetic form and then building it back
up again. Mary Gordon writes about Rankine’s new book,“I am
awestruck. Quite simply, I have never read anything like Plot. Its stupendous
intelligence . . . marks it as a masterpiece.”
Rankine was born in Kingston, Jamaica, and educated at Williams College
and Columbia University. She won the 1993 Kenyon Review Award for Literacy
Excellence in an Emerging Writer. She teaches at Barnard College and lives
in New York.
In Matthew Rohrer’s poetic landscape, the weather, food, and
even household appliances come to life; it is a surrealist world in which
toasters cry and sugar is afraid to be eaten. Mary Oliver writes, “Matthew
Rohrer’s poems are beautiful and disquieting. What he tells us about
his world, in language that is both lush and exact, is likely to be a
haunting experience. It was for me.”
Matthew Rohrer grew up in Oklahoma and attended the Iowa Writers’
Workshop, University College, Dublin, and the University of Michigan,
where he won an Avery Hopwood Award. His first book, A Hummock in the
Malookas, was selected by Mary Oliver for the 1994 National Poetry
Series, and his second book Satellite, was published in May 2001.
He lives in Brooklyn and is a poetry editor for Fence Magazine.
Selected
Works
Claudia Rankine
Nothing in Nature is Private (1995)
The End of the Alphabet (1998)
Plot (2001)
Matthew Rohrer
A Hummock in the Malookas (1994)
Satellite (2001)
Web
Site Links
Academy of American Poets web page
of Rankine
End of the Alphabet book review
Academy of American Poets web page
of Rohrer
Featured author
in Ploughshares
|
