Babel - The Poetry Shop

Babel

$20.00
Sale price  $20.00 Regular price 
Skip to product information
Babel - The Poetry Shop

University of Pittsburgh Press

Babel

$20.00
Sale price  $20.00 Regular price 
In stock
Babel features more of the rhetorical acrobatics that fueled Barbara Hamby's earlier work. These whirlwinds of words and sounds form vistas, images, and scenes that are at once unique and immediately recognizable.


In poems such as "Six, Sex, Say," she displays a linguistic bravado that moves effortlessly through translations, cognates, and homonyms. This love of words permeates the poems, from the husband wooing his future wife "with a barrage of words so cunningly fluent, / so linguistically adroit" in "Flesh, Bone, and Red," to the alphabetic sampler woven from memory and love in "Ode on My Mother's Handwriting."


Hamby's poems drift across histories and continents, from early writing and culture in Mesopotamia through the motion-picture heaven that seems so much like Paris, to odes on such thoroughly American subjects as hardware stores, bubblegum, barbecue, and sharp-tongued cocktail waitresses giving mandatory pre-date quizzes to lawyers and "orangutans in the guise of men." As Booklist noted in reviewing her previous collection, Hamby's poems "are tsunamis carrying you far out to sea and then back to shore giddy and glad to be alive."
Book Details
Publisher:
University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN:
9780822958598
Binding:
Paperback
Pages:
88
Authors:
Barbara Hamby
Published Date:
2004-11-07
Language:
English
Shipping

Ships directly from US distribution partners.
Economy (6-10 days) or Express (2-3 days)

Most orders arrive in less than a week.

Returns

We offer a 30-day return policy, which means you have 30 days after receiving your item to request a return. To be eligible for a return, your item must be in the same condition that you received it: new, unworn or unused, and in its original packaging. See details on our Return & Refund policy.

About Barbara Hamby

Born in New Orleans and raised in Hawaii, Barbara Hamby earned an MA from Florida State University in 1981 and was named a Distinguished University Scholar there in 2010. Her first collection, Delirium (University of North Texas Press, 1995), won the Vassar Miller Prize, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America. Babel (2004) won the Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her linked story collection Lester Higata's 20th Century received the 2010 Iowa Short Fiction Award. She has held a Guggenheim Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.

You may also like

If any information on The Poetry Shop contains an error that requires correction, please contact info@thepoetryshop.com