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Summary
Summary
A sophisticated and lyrical new collection from one of today's finest living poets.
Carol Muske-Dukes is an acclaimed novelist and poet whose latest collection, Sparrow , a haunting elegy for her late husband, was a finalist for the National Book Award. Twin Cities is an emotionally rich book of poems about how things double-by reflection, by reproduction, by severance. The poems embark from the twin cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul, divided by a legendary river, and move on to the parallel histories of a life lived and a life imagined-and the random intersection of the two. Lit by loss, these moving poems navigate between the poles of love and grief, curse and blessing, abandonment and rescue-they are two, and they are one.
Author Notes
Carol Muske-Dukes is the director of the graduate program in literature and creative writing at the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Even as she inhabits a mainstream of American culture focused on validating personal experience, Muske-Dukes stands out as a poet committed to lyrical intensity. The combination can be exhilarating, but it will occasionally frustrate more skeptical readers. There is an invigorating freedom and wit in lines like "Two dead friends are trumped/ By one late spouse" and "I'd rather imagine Catullus// Ranting in his brim-back ninth-inning cap," in which Muske-Dukes walks a tightrope over childhood, grief, sex, Hollywood, Minnesota, Beirut, and even poetry itself. For those who find a too-easy connection in those same lines, though, there is still what follows from her version of Catullus: "you're never going to feel better/ About losing the one person you never/ Wanted to lose," keen evidence of Muske-Dukes's ability to sharpen familiar subjects into something quick with feeling and perception. The book's title, which also belongs to three of its poems, suggests some of the neatness of Muske-Dukes's approach, which tends to see twos instead of either infinities or threes. But within that neatness she can still convincingly assert, "You could fail accurately at describing/ Your own life," a line whose startling accuracy is the deepest hallmark of this collection. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
Poet, essayist, and novelist Muske-Dukes discerns metaphorical resonance in her birthplace, St. Paul, Minnesota, and its twin city, Minneapolis. The symbiosis between the twin cities with a river between them inspires reflections on various forms of doubleness in poems as beautifully contoured and polished as river stones turned and lathed and buffed by deep currents. Muske-Dukes' language is earthy and unadorned, and yet, within her gleaming lines, common words shape-shift and morph into fresh and disarming imagery and realizations. In vibrant tableaus, wrenching stories, portraits, elegies, social objections, and metaphysical equations, the poet--lyrical, mournful, and funny considers suc. twin. as life and death, past and present, war and peace, men and women, art and life, yes and no. Ice-skaters do the whip; two kids labor over a condolence note; a mirror frames the essence of a relationship. The poet, Muske-Dukes muses, is . go-between. . double emissary. and she nimbly and exquisitely performs the poet's spirit-sustaining art of observation, remembrance, protest, connection, and drollery in a lucid, involving, and deeply gratifying collection.--Seaman, Donn. Copyright 2010 Booklist
Library Journal Review
Acclaimed poet and novelist Muske-Dukes (Sparrow; Channeling Mark Twain) tenderly ponders the self as both center and margin, both a real and an imagined pronouncement. She writes about loss in a language that absorbs all the commotion yet is never overwhelmed by it, and her earthy images pay homage to places that embody her own secrets and wonders. Most of the poems have a sense of crisis, ethical and emotional, that the poet highlights by juxtaposing two or more scenes, with the crisis tending to dissolve theatrically: "One Chador-clad woman reading Calvino/ on the train/ .I'll stand by the Kiss & Invisible Cities that/ Woman is reading/ Pal, they are saving us." Fading away, decaying, examining the scars that the passage of time leaves on what used to be fertile and dazzling-this is what Muske-Dukes does throughout ("Beauty grew too fast, like your body:/ Ungainly, unfaithful"). VERDICT A collection that highlights the richness that makes life mysterious and yet clear and immediate; for all readers.-Sadiq Alkoriji, South Regional Lib., Broward Cty., FL (c) Copyright 2011. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
