What She Knows

By: Marcia Roberts

Poetry. Marcia Roberts' reflective serial poems pursue the connecting events of one's life. In What She Knows, images, phrases, and movements of memory emerge in elegantly stated verse and prose that reveal more than personal biography, though the details of individual experience matter significantly. In this writing time and geography are imposed as forces that hone the features of the stories she tells. Gleanings of distant lives and gone worlds merge into more contemporary spaces, careful and curious perspectives moving through memory toward some future realization in the poem. Fragments of landscapes in South Dakota, California, Texas, and Spain arrive through voices, conversations, and the textures of the inanimate found in imagistic relations, like the sound of acorns hitting a roof. A many-textured and layered movement of intelligence in the serial form announces itself as something other to this author, whose own relation to these experiences remain secondary to the narrative revelations of the poem. The organization of the imaginary of one's life finds great possibility in Roberts' seriality. While a Midwest deadpan accompanies the sensitive and attentive presence of her new work, there is a sense also in which the story is responsible to larger cultural events. The poems press the human close to the surface of language. Dale Smith

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1935402307
• ISBN13: 9781935402305
• Release Date: February 2010
• Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
• Length: 60 Pages
• Weight: 0.37 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.3" x 0.1" x 7.5"