Cultivating Excess

by Lori Anderson

"Breaks the back of the language--she turns words on their heels and takes poetry into the shadowy corners of subject matter that doesn't rhyme, so to speak, with a certain straight line."--Kenyon Review "A brilliant poetic newcomer, whose work combines politics with prophesy with pyrotechnics."--Booklist (starred review)

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0933377185
• ISBN13: 9780933377189
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: Eighth Mountain Press
• Length: 128 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.9" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Difficulty Rewarded

The poems in Cultivating Excess are highly innovative yet also very much in the tradition of Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Adrienne Rich. They use exact language and build up a series of interconnections within and across the poems. Take just the title. It weds two words that tend to be perceived in opposition, but here the cultivation that informs the environmental component of her writing is linked with an overflowing that inverts expectations and rescues the cultivating female from the patriarchal domain of an enclosed space and sets her loose in the terrain of sexual politics. Precision of language is seen, for instance, in her use of surveying and timber terminology. Anderson's excess is not that of "excessive," but that of "exceeding," as in exceeding expectations, which marks both her own achievement but also the expanding of horizons for the reader in the ways that the poems connect ecology and feminism, the individual and the world. Like Marianne Moore, Anderson places demands on her readers and we benefit from rising to the challenge.