Rapture: Poems

New
Paperback
1992
$14.65

Rapture is the newest collection from a remarkable voice in American poetry. Susan Mitchell's poems are about self-discovery, and how memory and experience blend to lead us to newer, more realized and complex selves. Mitchell's gift is her ability to see, with humor and acuity, the extraordinary within the commonplace. Whether listening to a jazz pianist reaching for new sounds as he lingers over a hotel piano or recalling a runaway child on a bus trip across America, Mitchell guides us into a world of her narratives, a world in which she creates her reality by the mere act of observing it, and this reality, at once wholly unique and deeply familiar, has an exhilarating capacity for transcendence. Combining a boldly realistic vision with graceful, evocative lyricism, and moving easily between free verse and elegant versification, Rapture confirms Mitchell's place as one of the most compelling poets writing today.

Synopsis

Rapture is the newest collection from a remarkable voice in American poetry. Susan Mitchell's poems are about self-discovery, and how memory and experience blend to lead us to newer, more realized and complex selves. Mitchell's gift is her ability to see, with humor and acuity, the extraordinary within the commonplace. Whether listening to a jazz pianist reaching for new sounds as he lingers over a hotel piano or recalling a runaway child on a bus trip across America, Mitchell guides us into a world of her narratives, a world in which she creates her reality by the mere act of observing it, and this reality, at once wholly unique and deeply familiar, has an exhilarating capacity for transcendence. Combining a boldly realistic vision with graceful, evocative lyricism, and moving easily between free verse and elegant versification, Rapture confirms Mitchell's place as one of the most compelling poets writing today.

$14.65

Quantity

10 in stock

More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 96
Edition: 1
Publisher: HarperPerennial
Published: Apr 1992
ISBN 10: 0060969067
ISBN 13: 9780060969066

Media Reviews

Susan Mitchell's Rapture reinforces one's faith in the power of poetry to evoke the mystery, beauty, and terror of existence. Her art is the product of a first-class mind, in love with memory and language, enriched by myth and science, fastidious about particulars, and ever-inquiring. In their brilliant and sometimes erotic nervosity these poems are at once subtle and sensuous, dark and luminous, painful and exalted. -- Stanley Kunitz Susan Mitchell's poems are both subtle and passionate. At their best they set up a kind of centripetal rhetorical field into which casual idiom and arcane allusion are irresistible drawn. So (I should add) is the reader. -- James Merill

Author Bio

Susan Mitchell has won many awards for her poetry including fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the Lannan Foundation. Her previous collection of poetry, Rapture, won the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and was a National Book Award Finalist. Mitchell grew up in New York City and now lives in Boca Raton, where she holds the Mary Blossom Lee Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Florida Atlantic University. She is also the author of The Water Inside the Water.