Weapons Grade: Poems
ISBN: 9781610754538
Platform/Publisher: JSTOR / University of Arkansas Press
Digital rights: Users: unlimited; Printing: chapter; Download: chapter
Subjects: Language & Literature;

Svoboda's fifth collection of poems walks the borders where the personal and the political meet, and where ironic humor and foreboding overlap. Her contemporary America is both "finger-licking digital," and a place where there are "soldiers in mother's hair." In this book's first section, war is everywhere, from a lab in Tokyo where AIDS-infected blood was used for transfusions to "the cavities of your body." Section two takes up notions of mistranslations, misunderstandings and missed opportunities: in one poem, "a man walks into a bra"; in another a son asks of a missing father, "Is he back or forth?" The final section takes up more personal subjects, as in a poem titled "To My Brother, on the Occasion of His Second Breakdown." Throughout, Svoboda's poems are as haunting as they are funny, as pleasurable as they are powerful. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Terese Svoboda is the author of ten books of prose and poetry, most recently Black Glasses Like Clark Kent that won the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize. Her honors in poetry include the Iowa Poetry Prize and two prizes from the Poetry Society of America, the Lucille Medwick Award, and Cecil Hemley Award. She has also won an O. Henry Prize for the short story, the Bobst Prize for fiction, a Pushcart Prize for an essay, and a National Endowment for the Humanities fellowship in translation. Her opera WET premiered at Los Angeles Disney Hall in 2005. Svoboda lives in New York City.

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