A book-length poem set in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, from a
writer whose work offers "something few poets ever discover: a vision of
the whole world" (Dan Chiasson, The New Yorker)
Robyn Schiff's fourth collection is an ambitious book-length poem in
three parts set at The Metropolitan Museum of Art's information desk,
where Schiff long ago held a staff position. Elaborately mapping an
interconnected route in and out of the museum through history, material,
and memory, Information Desk: An Epic takes us on an anguished
soul-quest and ecstatic intellectual query to confront the violent
forces that inform the museum's encyclopedic collection and the
spiritual powers of art.
Novelistic in its sweep, frantically informative, and deeply intimate in
its private recollections, Information Desk: An Epic wayfares with
riveting lyric intensity through an epic array of topics and concerns,
including illusion, deception, self-deception, complicity, lecherous
coworkers, the composition of pigment, the scattering of seeds, ideas,
and capital, and insect infestations spreading within artwork. Along the
way, Schiff pauses to invoke three terrifying muses--parasitic wasps--in
desperate awe of their powers of precision and generative energy.
Information Desk: An Epic undertakes a hemorrhaging ekphrastic journey
through artifice and the natural world.
