Standing Water: Poems

By Eleanor Chai

Book Overview

A profound literary debut that recounts a child's singular story

Since I made you, you may

imagine I set myself on fire--
or better, say: you lit the funeral pyre
from ten thousand days away.

A young woman in Paris encounters an uncanny presence on a tour of a small museum. A study by Rodin of the dancer Little Hanako--titled Head of Sorrow--triggers in the young woman recognition of her mother, a mother erased from her life since childhood.

Thus begins Eleanor Chai's Standing Water, one of the most remarkable first books of poetry in recent years. It is a journey into the past as well as the present--into the narrative hidden from the poet since birth, as well as the strategies that she has adopted to survive. It is a journey about how we learn to cope with, to perceive and describe, the world. It is a story about savage privilege and deprivation.

Haunting the whole is the figure of the real Little Hanako--Rodin's model, a Japanese artist displaced in Europe, the medium through which other artists dream and discover the world.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0374536864
• ISBN13: 9780374536862
• Release Date: April 2017
• Publisher: Fsg Adult
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.36 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.2" x 8.0"