Unraveling at the Name

By Jenny Factor

Book Overview

Selected by Marilyn Hacker as winner of the Hayden Carruth Award.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1556591764
• ISBN13: 9781556591761
• Release Date: June 2002
• Publisher: Copper Canyon Press
• Length: 96 Pages
• Weight: 0.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 6.0" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

singing the stories history hides

Jenny Factor's often deceptively casual poems wear their prosodic mastery lightly, combining formal fluency and personal urgency, fulfilling a will to make form out of feeling: "This life I've written out and can control." Unraveling at the Name revolves, unravels even, around a remarkable set of skewed sonnet sequences about love requited and un- (and love's various alibis and substitutes), desire and sex and their often awkward relationship (what Factor calls the "urgency of appetite"), marriage, coming out and learning to come, lesbian motherhood, and loneliness. A canzone about fisting informs us that "Forms/binds. Form combines. Form liberates," and this book demonstrates the ways in which all of these propositions can be true, simultaneously and in turn. "My story's underneath this history./Turn off the radio. I want to sing," Factor writes, and sing she does.

poems of formal grace and beauty

This is a *perfect* first book -- tight, thoughtful, eloquent. Jenny Factor creates a poetry-novella. Her speaker redefines herself and in the process meditates on the nature of shapes and transformation in poems that are carefully shaped and transforming. The book is also, unexpectedly fun and naughty. Personable and smart. And a quick read. Bravely anchored in the gritty stuff but hinged to the tranforming moment. Like folk song. Zen meditation. Or a pulp novel. Factor turns over the raw facts of sexual awakening, each time with shifting nuances and emphases.