Description
Present Tense is a tour de force, a book-length poetic project that is anatomy, history, testimony, eulogy, and divining rod of our constantly evolving present. In four acts, Rabinowitz dramatizes not only our various socio-religious-political ecosystems but also the myriad echoes of those systems that resound in our psyches and permeate our thoughts. Through dialogue, reportage, Biblical reference, interview, famous speech, infamous cultural and historical events and more, Rabinowitz offers readers an arresting account of who and what we are as humans—in all of our darkness and our brilliance. This poetry—with its invigorating breadth and shocking immediacy—compels its readers’ full engagement with the page, an interaction that incites us to examine our own position and potential in the ever-shifting kaleidoscope of the actual, as we experience it moment by moment.
The relation of time to violence constitutes the central question of this piercing work. Using a wide range of voices and various forms, from litany to quotation to dialogue to nursery rhyme, Rabinowitz tries to occupy the present as a kind of prayer that could disengage the hurtling fall of time and disarm its inevitable news. It is news we recognize, and while her goal is impossible, the beauty of the attempt is deeply moving.
Cole Swensen
Anna Rabinowitz’s Present Tense is packed with urgent questions about morality, mortality and god. Through anaphora, acrostics, interviews, letters to famous figures, postcard questionnaires, counterintelligence interrogation manuals and contorted nursery rhymes (to name just a few of Rabinowitz’s inventive strategies), she summons up a past where “god was a ravenous god / a mouth before words,” and a present in which “Hearts blacken in unblossoming.” It’s a fierce and unflinching reckoning.
Matthea Harvey
About the Author
Reviews
Excerpt
Anna Rabinowitz has published three books of poetry, The Wanton Sublime: A Florilegium of Whethers and Wonders, Tupelo, 2006, Darkling, Tupelo, 2001 (which will be translated into German and published by Luxbooks, Wesibaden, Germany, forthcoming 2010), and At the Site of Inside Out, University of Mass. Press 1997. Darkling was a finalist for ForeWord Magazine’s Best Poetry Book of 2001 Award and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2002, and At the Site of Inside Out was a winner of the Juniper Prize. American Opera Projects transformed Darkling into an experimental opera-theatre work that blurs distinctions between poetry, theater, and music. This production had its world premiere to great critical acclaim on February 26, 2006 at the 13th St. Theatre, NYC. A National Endowment for the Arts Fellow for 2001, Anna Rabinowitz has published widely in such journals as Atlantic Monthly, Boston Review, The Paris Review, Colorado Review, Southwest Review, Denver Quarterly, Sulfur, LIT, VOLT, Verse, and Doubletake. Her work has also been reprinted in The Best American Poetry 1989, edited by Donald Hall, Life on the Line: Selections on Words and Healing, The KGB Bar Reader, The Poets’ Grimm, Poetry Daily, and Poetry After 9/11.
Present Tense is divided into four acts, the format of a play suiting it particularly as it delves into the drama of life and the various influences of our culture. Rabinowitz incorporates various styles in her poetry—free verse, glossary, list poems, sectioned poetry, narrative, and the list goes on. Her poems integrate a vast array of elements, taking from everything—from historical events to interviews, citing Woody Allen and Proverbs.
Present Tense, the title of Anna Rabinowitz’s new collection of poetry, presents a present tense of heaving geometries and “pellets of time.” Time is, as it were, of essence. It is the laceration behind the light of her language, the friction from which she derives her heat. We are out of time, in time, on time, claimed by time, wrestling with time, dreading time, shredding time, shedding time, sparing and spearing and spending time.
In her latest volume of poetry, Present Tense, Anna Rabinowitz faces squarely the matter of temporal alienation. Even the title deserves our pause. At first glance, it looks like a simple reference to simple grammar. We often write and think and speak in present tense. It is the mode of everyday commerce. But we readily see the double entendre, accentuated by the fact that the cover’s text is distorted: the present is tense.
This stunning work of lucid but uncomfortable insight, and her use of powerful, transforming imagery and language, has resonated in my subconsciousness for days. What does it mean to possess a soul, to be biological, to invent time – primarily to establish purpose – and with this new and sterile construct of history, devolve to violence?
“Pre-emptive fictions and futile plots,” writes Anna Rabinowitz in her new poetry collection Present Tense, “unmask reality as a triumph of open wounds.” As the book’s title suggests, Rabinowitz primarily uses the present tense to criticize war, vilify the violent, and mourn the oppressed of our modern world. It shouldn’t be surprising that, given the overall topic of the collection, these forms are often experimental and frenzied. The reader who shares her politics is therefore reminded of what has been done and what needs to be done.
A HISTORY OF TIME IV
welcome to oblivion
identity dissolves on this fool’s page,
in memory of the past
black and white and the vast terrain
of gray between
all lies suppressed
forever hidden,
the world’s riddle
only consciousness made real
the word fails, the heart fails,
light forsakes the sky
all things confess their ashes
