| From the Bones Out Contributor(s): de Los Santos, Marisa (Author) |
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ISBN: 1570033234 ISBN-13: 9781570033230 Publisher: University of South Carolina Press OUR PRICE: $17.09 Product Type: Paperback Published: May 2000 Annotation: "My lover tells me I am like this place./I tell him what I miss: the slap of leaves/on skin and air that's like a damp embrace". The poems of this debut have a Cinderella-like innocence, transforming ugliness into beauty and waving the wand of well-crafted metaphor over all they encounter. The horrific suicide of a grandfather, a mother's cancer, the mourning for a stillborn child, the potential foreclosure of a neighbor's farm are all recounted with a refined clarity. Yet through it all, de los Santos manages to frame life's traumas with a voice that can seem borrowed from the Stage Manager in Our Town: "Some years/were fair, but most were bad./The taxes, worse than weevil, tried/to take each dime she had". However, there are also poems, such as "Io's Gift", that evoke, through their subtlety and sensuality, the pleasures of the ever-changing consciousness of the female body: "I learned myself, bit/ by bit, or maybe I/ should say I dawned/ upon myself, a slow dawning". There are also glamorous poems, including "Supermodel", and "Perfect Dress", in which the poet indulges in herself as an object of perfect beauty: "Someone will murmur, /'She is sublime, '/will be precisely right, and I will step, /with incandescent shoulders, / into my perfect evening". In its worked simplicity, this is a first book that offers a formula of hope and clarity when confronting life's trials and tribulations. |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - Poetry | American - General |
| Dewey: 811.6 |
| LCCN: 99050918 |
| Physical Information: 0.33" H x 5.29" W x 8.48" (0.20 lbs) 79 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: Marisa de los Santos often situates her poems in the rich, vividly evoked landscapes of Virginia and Texas as well as her father's homeland, the Philippines, but their true territory is the body itself, particularly the female body. Throughout her work there is a sharp longing for a life of the senses, of pure corpus. In the words of the poem Women Watching Basketball, there is the Whitmanian desire to declare Divine is the flesh and for once to believe it, believe it. De los Santos is acutely conscious of all that interferes with the realization of this desire: the brutalities of illness, the transfigurations of age, our readiness to respond to the body as seen object rather than active sentient subject. Even the very passion for language that brings these poems to life is a risk, and in the poem Io's Gift, the mythical nymph Io laments, A woman made of words is milkweed, bound to rattle open, scatter, and be lost. In From the Bones Out, loss, doubt, and conflict engender poems of lucidity and compassion--amounting to empathic verbal gestures--that build connections between women, as well as between women and men, and that seek to illuminate the simple elusive fact that the world is full of lives, each real, each different from the other. The compassion the poems express in sometimes strictly formal, always shapely, lines and stanzas is what gives this collection its grace and moral urgency. |