 | |
| Author | Annelyse Gelman |
|---|---|
| Publisher | University of Chicago Press |
Publication date | March 31, 2013 |
| Pages | 54 |
| ISBN | 978-0226826110 |
| Preceded by | Pool |
Vexations is a 2023 poetry collection by Annelyse Gelman. [1] It was published by University of Chicago Press for its Phoenix Poets series after Gelman's manuscript won the 2022 James Laughlin Award. [2] A singular poem the length of a book, Vexations was longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry. [3]
The book is a single poem, following a pregnant speaker as she traverses the destruction of the world—a time described as "the year the hurricanes began" amid other disasters, including human-induced turmoil. In such a setting, the poem addresses issues like climate change, gun violence, reproductive rights, and others. [1]
The book is titled and structured after the Erik Satie composition of the same name which bore an inscription to perform its motif 840 times. [4] Gelman, at age 16, had seen a 24-hour performance of the Satie piece at the California Institute of the Arts which later propelled her to write the book:
"I had a sleeping bag and lay on the floor, listening and not listening, eventually entering into this psychedelic mental space brought about by the tension between repetition and variation, boredom and surprise." [5]
Other influences for the book were pieces of "durational art" along the likes of James Turrell, Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field , and drone music. Gelman also cited her studies in psychology as a student at Reed College and her participation in slam poetry at University of California, Berkeley as important to her realization of the poem. [6] [5] She said in The Adroit Journal that she had wanted to create an "ambient poem" or "something modular and rearrangeable, that would go on and on and never repeat the same sequences." [7]
Critics observed the apocalyptic, violent setting of Gelman's poem. [8] The Poetry Foundation called the book a "dystopic poem" and said "Rather than repeating text in full, Gelman's Vexations moves in organized disjunction through a winding narrative that insists and compels." [9] The Los Angeles Review of Books compared the book to Cormac McCarthy's The Road and stated "The skeletal plot, polyvocal at times, proceeds not by logic but through the dislocations we all feel in a time of sociopolitical turmoil, and it is Gelman's surreal touches and command of a highly nuanced language that propel us". [4] 4Columns wrote that "Rarely punctuated, [Gelman's] oracular lines make meaning in their steady, glittery, toxic accumulation. She delineates a dying Earth—as dry report, as creamy choral litany—while a daughter grows up and futures close down." [10] The New York Review of Books said "The poem makes a sound as terrifying as it is familiar: the nervous patter of a world at the end of its days." [11]
Rae Armantrout is an American poet generally associated with the Language poets. She has published more than two dozen books, including both poetry and prose.
Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks was an American poet, author, and teacher. Her work often dealt with the personal celebrations and struggles of ordinary people in her community. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry on May 1, 1950, for Annie Allen, making her the first African American to receive a Pulitzer Prize.
Rita Frances Dove is an American poet and essayist. From 1993 to 1995, she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American to have been appointed since the position was created by an act of Congress in 1986 from the previous "consultant in poetry" position (1937–86). Dove also received an appointment as "special consultant in poetry" for the Library of Congress's bicentennial year from 1999 to 2000. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1987, and she served as the Poet Laureate of Virginia from 2004 to 2006. Since 1989, she has been teaching at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, where she held the chair of Commonwealth Professor of English from 1993 to 2020; as of 2020, she holds the chair of Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil is an American poet and essayist. She currently serves as poetry editor of Sierra Magazine and as professor of English in the University of Mississippi's MFA program, where she previously was the John and Renee Grisham Writer-in-Residence in 2016-17. She has also taught at the Kundiman Retreat for Asian American writers. Nezhukumatathil draws upon her Filipina and Malayali Indian background to give her perspective on love, loss, and land. She lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with her husband, Dustin Parsons, and their two sons.
Kenneth Goldsmith is an American poet and critic. He was the founding editor of UbuWeb and an artist-in-residence at the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing (CPCW) at the University of Pennsylvania, where he taught. He was also a senior editor of PennSound at the University of Pennsylvania. He hosted a weekly radio show at WFMU from 1995 until June 2010. He published 32 books including ten books of poetry, notably Fidget (2000), Soliloquy (2001), Day (2003) and his American trilogy, The Weather (2005), Traffic (2007), and Sports (2008), 'Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2011), and 'Capital: New York Capital of the Twentieth Century (2015). He also was the author of three books of essays, Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (2011), Wasting Time on The Internet (2016), and Duchamp Is My Lawyer: The Polemics, Pragmatics, and Poetics of UbuWeb (2020). In 2013, he was appointed the Museum of Modern Art's first poet laureate.
Tracy K. Smith is an American poet and educator. She served as the 22nd Poet Laureate of the United States from 2017 to 2019. She has published five collections of poetry, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her 2011 collection Life on Mars. Her memoir, Ordinary Light, was published in 2015.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Jane Hirshfield is an American poet, essayist, and translator, known as 'one of American poetry's central spokespersons for the biosphere' and recognized as 'among the modern masters,' 'writing some of the most important poetry in the world today.' A 2019 elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, her books include numerous award-winning collections of her own poems, collections of essays, and edited and co-translated volumes of world writers from the deep past. Widely published in global newspapers and literary journals, her work has been translated into over fifteen languages.
Yolande Cornelia "Nikki" Giovanni Jr. was an American poet, writer, commentator, activist and educator. One of the world's best-known African-American poets, her work includes poetry anthologies, poetry recordings, and nonfiction essays, and covers topics ranging from race and social issues to children's literature. She won numerous awards, including the Langston Hughes Medal and the NAACP Image Award. She was nominated for a 2004 Grammy Award for her poetry album, The Nikki Giovanni Poetry Collection. Additionally, she was named as one of Oprah Winfrey's 25 "Living Legends". Giovanni was a member of The Wintergreen Women Writers Collective.
Terrance Hayes is an American poet and educator who has published seven poetry collections. His 2010 collection, Lighthead, won the National Book Award for Poetry in 2010. In September 2014, he was one of 21 recipients of a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, awarded to individuals who show outstanding creativity in their work.
Ada Limón is an American poet. On July 12, 2022, she was named the 24th Poet Laureate of the United States by the Librarian of Congress. This made her the first Latina to be Poet Laureate of the United States. She is married to Lucas Marquardt.
Elizabeth Alexander is an American poet, writer, and literary scholar who has served as the president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation since 2018.
Brenda Shaughnessy is an Asian American poet most known for her poetry books Our Andromeda and So Much Synth. Her book, Our Andromeda, was named a Library Journal "Book of the Year," one of The New York Times's "100 Best Books of 2013." Additionally, The New York Times and Publishers Weekly named So Much Synth as one of the best poetry collections of 2016. Shaughnessy works as an Associate Professor of English in the MFA Creative Writing program at Rutgers University–Newark.
Sharon Mesmer is a Polish-American poet, fiction writer, essayist and professor of creative writing. Her poetry collections are Annoying Diabetic Bitch, The Virgin Formica, Vertigo Seeks Affinities, Half Angel, Half Lunch and Crossing Second Avenue. Her fiction collections are Ma Vie à Yonago, In Ordinary Time and The Empty Quarter. She teaches in the undergraduate and graduate programs of New York University and The New School. She has lived in Brooklyn, New York since 1988 and is a distant relative of Franz Anton Mesmer, proponent of animal magnetism and Otto Messmer, the American animator best known for creating Felix the Cat.
"Fog" is a poem written by Carl Sandburg. It first appeared in Sandburg's first mainstream collection of poems, Chicago Poems, published in 1916.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish poet and essayist who writes in both Irish and English.
Rachel Eliza Griffiths, Lady Rushdie is an American poet, novelist, photographer and visual artist, who is the author of five published collections of poems. In Seeing the Body (2020), she "pairs poetry with photography, exploring memory, Black womanhood, the American landscape, and rebirth." It was a nominee for the 2021 NAACP Image Award in Poetry.
Annelyse Gelman is an American poet. Her second poetry collection, Vexations, won the 2022 James Laughlin Award and has been longlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Poetry.
Afterland: Poems is a 2017 debut poetry collection by Hmong American poet Mai Der Vang. It was published by Graywolf Press after Vang won the Walt Whitman Award in 2016, which included publication as a prize. Vang's manuscript had been chosen by Carolyn Forché. The book later went on to be a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry.
Shelley Wong is an American poet. In 2022, she released her debut poetry collection, As She Appears, after winning the YesYes Books Pamet River Prize in 2019, and her work has appeared in the Kenyon Review, the New England Review, and other publications. Her poetry has been supported by the Vermont Studio Center, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the Fire Island Artist Residency, the San Francisco Arts Commission, among others.