A new collection from the author of Or To Begin Again, a finalist
for the 2009 National Book Award in Poetry
Ann Lauterbach is one of America's most innovative and provocative
poets, acclaimed for her fierce, sensuous and intellectually charged
poems. In this, her ninth book of poems, Lauterbach pursues longstanding
inquiries into how language forms and informs our understanding of the
relation between empirical observation and subjective response; worldly
attachment and inwardness; the given and the chosen. The poems set out
not so much to find cogent resolutions to these fluid dyads as to open
them to the fact of unknowing that is at the core of all human curiosity
and desire. A central prose section tracks along a meditative edge,
engaging the risky task of opening the mind to the limits of
apprehension; the final section evokes, in the figure of the instructor,
the essential contemporary question of how information becomes
knowledge.