The Ruins of Nostalgia
by Donna Stonecipher
Buy on AmazonNew work from one of the most compelling and transformative writers of the contemporary prose poem What is it to feel nostalgia, to be skeptical of it yet cleave intently to the complex truths of feeling and thought? In a series of 64 gorgeous, ramifying, unsettling prose poems addressing late-twentieth- and twenty-first century experience and its discontents, The Ruins of Nostalgia offers a strikingly original exploration of the misunderstood phenomenon of nostalgia as both feeling-state and historical phenomenon. Each poem, also titled The Ruins of Nostalgia, is a kind of lyrical mini-essay, playful, passionate, analytic. Some poems take a location, memory, conceit, or object as their theme.…
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"Donna Stonecipher is a strange, dark, deeply nuanced and undersung poet whose work I have loved for many years. These new prose poems meditate quietly on the collective and individual longing for the past, which Stonecipher calls “only a recurring dream of never arriving.” Essayistic, utterly vulnerable and sobered by recent events, Stonecipher wonders whether “looking forward was actually, depending on your standpoint in history, looking backward, or the reverse.” In disorienting times, why not make disorientation beautiful?"
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