Details

ISBN-10: 0819565253
ISBN-13: 9780819565259
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publish Date: 11/27/2001
Dimensions: 9.78" L, 4.08" W, 0.30" H

Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You

Paperback

Price: $15.95

Overview

This book of “documentary poetics” is by an important up and coming female experimentalist.

Juliana Spahr uses details to explore Hawai’i’s politics of location and her own place in it as an outsider: a hard-core show where the singer shouts out “fuck you-aloha-I love you” over and over; the pidgin word ‘da kine;’ native Hawaiian rights to gathering; Palolo stream; the similarities and differences between hotel rooms and conference rooms; and acrobats at a Las Vegas-style floor show in Waikiki. Spahr is attentive to specifics and she draws from documentary poetics in these five interconnected poems that move between lyricism, rhythmic repetition, and explanatory prose. Conceptually provocative and yet moving at the same time, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You demands reading and re-reading.

  • Juliana Spahr is a poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S. poet whose art and teaching demonstrate great imagination and daring. Spahr received the National Poetry Series Award for her first collection of poetry, Response. Her novel An Army of Lovers written with David Buuck was published by City Lights. Her many titles include, Well Then There Now, The Transformation, This Connection of Everyone with Lungs, Fuck You-Aloha-I Love You, and Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity. Wiith Jena Osman, Spahr edits the book series Chain Links, and with nineteen other poets she edits the collectively funded Subpress. The editor of numerous critical anthologies, she teaches at Mills College.

    (She is pictured here with David Buuck, co-author of An Army of Lovers)

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Reviews

"An understated, careful examination of the individual in the troubled nexus of the law, community, culture, and, centrally, language . . . continues [Spahr's] search for the verbal means to realize others without resort to an identity-based voice. She succeeds brilliantly with 'a younger man, an older man, and a woman, ' one of four long sequences here . . . [the] tension between the black heart of anger and faith in community makes this a distinct, ambitious book of poems."–Publishers Weekly

"An understated, careful examination of the individual in the troubled nexus of the law, community, culture, and, centrally, language . . . continues [Spahr's] search for the verbal means to realize others without resort to an identity-based voice. She succeeds brilliantly with 'a younger man, an older man, and a woman, ' one of four long sequences here . . . [the] tension between the black heart of anger and faith in community makes this a distinct, ambitious book of poems."–Publishers Weekly

"The more I read through Spahr's work, the more interested I am in reading further, and deeper"–Rob McLennan, Rob McLennan's blog

More Reviews

Details

ISBN-10: 0819565253
ISBN-13: 9780819565259
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
Publish Date: 11/27/2001
Dimensions: 9.78" L, 4.08" W, 0.30" H
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