Post by shayepoet on Oct 29, 2008 4:49:05 GMT 2
F2F
Janet Holmes
"F2F: Shorthand for “face-to-face,” as in meeting someone in real life, flesh-to-flesh, as opposed to in the electronic world of cyberspace. Used in chat rooms and while instant messaging on the Internet.
At the core of this challenging new collection from Janet Holmes is the conceit of the sense of sight and the complex role it plays in women’s self-identities and relationships.
Emily Dickinson is introduced as the iconic female writer who, unread in her time, is frequently misinterpreted and unheard. Holmes relates Dickinson’s self-isolation to the writer’s isolation from the reader and the intimacy of the act of reading. Echo, Eurydice, and Eros—other “E” figures, these mythological, their stories relying on seeing and being seen—are related by Holmes to twentieth-century counterparts manifesting as an anorexic, a flamboyant dresser, and a love god, respectively.
Holmes intersperses her meditation with the language of online text-messaging, employing it as a vehicle for probing the dual limitations and liberties afforded on-line correspondents. Through her correspondents’ postings, we chart their relationship evolving without benefit of ever meeting or exchanging photographs, the participants deeply affected by the absence of the sense of sight. By turns provocative and timid, lyrical and terse, the voices in F2F exhibit myriad human reactions to how seeing each other influences how we behave."
--From the Publisher
Sample poem:
List
Saying writing
You are the only one I can talk to
Hearing reading
And you are the only one I can talk to
You are not giggling under the tablecloth you are two adults
sitting at expensive computers touch-typing (oh! yes) resting
your index fingers on the F and the J waiting for the incoming
ping of the instanter message like a starting gun
gd 2 c u again
wass^?
your form is never more than an extension of such content
no one sees you
and no one sees you
doing it
Raves and reviews for F2F:
"Holmes's attention to sound ("write with light / durable words indelible") is familiar poetic territory, but here it takes on new meaning because it so exceeds, or opposes, the text-messaging medium from which the language is drawn. This is like William Carlos Williams's experiments--or Bob Creeley's--in the excerpting and reframing of casual speech: the perception that a general method could be applied to a new, apparently unpromising and impoverished linguistic realm is one of the book's most forward brilliances."
—Charles O. Hartman
"Drawing heavily from the compact linguistic style of modern text messaging, F2F (shorthand for 'face to face,' that is, meeting someone in real life rather than in cyberspace) draws both upon modern experience and upon classic dichotomies of myth as it represents the technological communications of love."
— The Midwest Book Review
"E, Echo, Eurydice, Emily and Eros—legacy resonance meets current disturbance f2f in Janet Holmes's melancholy music; reader, she addresses you, as she gently probes, pings, love life on the network."
—Stephanie Strickland, author of V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una
"In F2F, the word-wall between author and reader becomes a projection screen for a shadow-play of sad couplings—Echo and Narcissus, Eurydice and Orpheus, a pair of instant-messaging lovers. Be warned: the witty, techy feel of Holmes' writing is the flashy surface of a bruising vision of human interaction in which self-exposure is impossible and invisibility is punishingly lonely."
—Catherine Wagner, author of Macular Hole and Miss America
About the author:
Janet Holmes, published widely in journals and anthologies, is an award-winning author of four books of poetry including Green Tuxedo and Humanophone (also published by the University of Notre Dame Press), with a fifth (The ms of my kin, Shearsman Books) due in 2009. Director and editor of Ahsahta Press, she is Professor of English in the MFA program at Boise State University.
ISBN: 978-0-268-03076-6, 96 pages, $20.00
University of Notre Dame Press
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UND Press: undpress.nd.edu/book/P01127
Amazon: tinyurl.com/599y6f