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Acclaimed poet Susan Wheeler, whose last individual collection predicted the spiritual losses of the economic collapse, turns her attention to the most intimate of subjects: the absence or loss of love.
A meme is a unit of thought replicated by imitation; examples of memes, Richard Dawkins wrote, "are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches." Occupy Wall Street is a meme, as are internet ideas and images that go viral. What could be more potent memes than those passed down by parents to their children?
Wheeler reconstructs her mother's voice - down to its cynicism and its mid twentieth-century midwestern vernacular - in "The Maud Poems," a voice that takes a more aggressive, vituperative turn in "The Devil - or - The Introjects." In the book's third long sequence, a generational inheritance feeds cultural transmission in "The Split." A set of variations on losses and break-ups - wildly, darkly funny throughout and, in places, devastatingly sad - "The Split" brings Wheeler's lauded inventiveness, wit, and insight to the profound loss of love. One read, and the meme "Should I stay or should I go?" will be altered in your head forever.
"Starred Review. Wheeler's ambitious new book comes closer to doing everything - much closer - and we are left awed at Wheeler's audacity." - Publishers Weekly
"In Meme, the traditional elegy dissolves into excited bursts of imitated idiomatic speech interwoven with writing from a different register - the coolly removed, self-insightful lyric. That the elaborately constructed edifice that is personality can be reconstructed with such fascinating economy and delightful indirection is amazing. These poems are pure poetic genius." - Mary Jo Bang, author, The Bride of E
"Meme is a haunted work. We are ushered in by the disembodied voice of a mother figure, scolding and teasing in the time-stamped slang of past decades. The anachronism is both funny and terribly sad. 'Don't come in here all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed,' the voice says. And it turns out that's fair warning. This cracked Virgil leads us into a consciously Dantean underworld ('Had you entered the thicket in darkness/... Had you been mid-life, not in haze but in crisis?'). Wheeler has created a total (and to me terrifying) linguistic environment in which hell is the introjected voices of other people, the hungry ghosts of our recent past." - Rae Armantrout, author, Money Shot
This information about Meme was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Susan Wheeler is the author of the poetry collections Bag 'o' Diamonds, which received the Norma Farber First Book Award of the Poetry Society of America; Smokes, which won the Four Way Books Award; Source Codes; Ledger, winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; and Assorted Poems. Her novel, Record Palace, was published in 2005. She teaches at Princeton University, where she also directs the Creative Writing Program.
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