POETRY · FICTION
Anne Waldman
Also known as: Waldman, Anne, 1945-...., Waldman, Anne
Anne Waldman was part of the late Sixties poetry scene in the East Village. She ran the St. Mark's Church Poetry Project, and gave exuberant, highly physical readings of her own work. She became a Buddhist, worshipping with the Tibetan Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, who would also become Allen Ginsberg's guru. She and Ginsberg worked together to create a poetry school, the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, at Trungpa's Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. Anne Waldman is one of the most interesting, vibrant and unpredictable members of the post-Beat poetry community. Her confluence of Buddhist concerns and thought-paths with sources of physicality and anger is particularly impressive (did you get all that?).-GoodReads
Gedanken, or thought, experiments are tests of hypotheses that take place in the imagination rather than the laboratory.
— from Out of this world
Most acclaimed
Marriage
1818
Publisher's description -- Nearly everywhere and at all times, marriage has enjoyed a privileged status as the primary social unit -- the essential bond that created alliances between families and a bridge between the sexes. In joining a man and woman, marriage attempted to hold men to collective social standards, including responsibility for the women they impregnated and the children they fathered, while also stringently hedging in women's sexuality. In short, marriage has always demanded that both men and women sacrifice a considerable measure of individual freedom. In marriage, "I" becomes "we," and "we" frequently extends beyond the couple to extended family, clan, and society. For these reasons, both political and religious authorities typically have taken great care to present marriage as an institution to which individual interests must be subordinated. At the time of her death in January 2007, the celebrated historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese was worried that these attitudes were in the process of being reversed. In this book, which she was in the midst of preparing for publication at the time of her passing, she argues that marriage is disintegrating under the rising demands that it serve not the good of the whole but the desires of the individual. A union that at one point was used to limit individual "rights" is now claimed as one right among many. The sexual liberation movements of the last forty years have seriously undermined marriage, argues Fox-Genovese, so much so that the institution seems to face the threat of extinction. Even so, she writes, "Marriage for love -- the promise of an enduring and engulfing bond between a man and a woman -- is a dream that refuses to die. ... It still promises that we will finally be loved as we long to be loved." That dream is the ultimate theme of this book, a fitting coda to Elizabeth Fox-Genovese's distinguished career.
Manatee/humanity
A fascinating new work from an internationally renowned poetAnne Waldmans new investigative hybrid-poem explores the nuances of inter-species communication and compassion. It draws on animal lore, animal encounters (with grey wolf and manatee), dreams, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and Buddhist ritual to render a text of remarkable sympathy, reciprocity, and power. The poem asks questions as well as urges further engagement with the endangered (including our human selves). Part performance litany, part survival kit, part worried mammalian soundings, Waldman explores, as ever, what it means to inhabit our condition through language and imagination inside a wheel of time. This is the mature work of a philosophical field poet with a shamanic metabolism.
Out of this world
Although this anthology features some of the most popular names in futuristic and paranormal romance, it reads more like a catalogue than a cohesive book. Robb's "Interlude in Death," featuring Lieutenant Eve Dallas, kicks off the collection and is the strongest of the four entries. The story's suspense is as well drawn as the romance, and readers won't have to be familiar with Robb's In Death series (Betrayal in Death, etc.) to enjoy this futuristic thriller. Hamilton's "Magic Like Heat Across My Skin" finds Vampire Hunter Anita Blake in an S/M club with her two lovers, a Master Vampire and a werewolf king. As one might imagine of such a setting, the sensuality is dark and intense, but this will be no surprise to fans of Hamilton's Vampire Hunter novels (Obsidian Butterfly, etc.). "Kinsman," Krinard's (Touch of the Wolf) tale of two telepaths who try to prevent an interspecies war, falls victim to its own exposition and draws to a conclusion that is steamy but familiar. Shayne's "Immortality" features Puabi, a Dark Witch of Sumer who is reincarnated to right an ancient wrong. Each of the works in this anthology is solid and should please current fans, but as a whole, the stories are only loosely connected and would have benefited from a stronger theme to tie them together.