Apprentice To The Flower Poet Z - Softcover

Weinstein, Debra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812970942 ISBN 13: 9780812970944

Publisher: Ballantine Books, 2004

Synopsis

Delighted when she lands a job with the eminent Flower Poet Z., Annabelle G., an aspiring young poet, soon realizes that she has acquired the mentor from hell instead of finding a meaningful relationship and learns more than she wants to about Z.'s dysfunctional family, adultery, and backstabbing. A first novel. Reader's Guide included. Reprint. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Debra Weinstein received NYU’s Bobst Literary Award for Emerging Writers upon publication of her volume of poetry, Rodent Angel. She is also a recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for poetry and a New York State Foundation for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for Fiction. She has been in residence at both the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Her poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, Tikkun, and The Portable Lower East Side. She lives in Manhattan.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. is about two women: Annabelle, an aspiring young poet from the suburbs, and Z., the celebrated mentor who tries to hold her back. It s no accident that their initials span the alphabet, as this hilarious book is about language, writing, and the appropriation of ideas. It is also about the high-wire relations between older and younger women, between reputation and aspiration.

There is so much I wanted to learn from Z., Annabelle confesses in the opening chapter. Obsessed with the question What is poetry? Annabelle thinks her new job with the distinguished Flower Poet Z. will help her penetrate the answer. What is revealed to Annabelle instead are the secrets of Z. s personal life not least, her dysfunctional family, adulterous behavior, and professional tyranny. Meanwhile, Annabelle is charged with finding Z. s favorite ink ( jet black, not midnight black, not shoeshine black ), buying prescription cat food for a cranky literary critic, and illegally beheading flowers in the New York Botanical Gardens anything to preserve Z. s psychic space.

As for what Annabelle learns about the literary world, much of it occurs in spite of Z. in writing seminars where one-line poems are toiled over for years; in bed with her James Joyce fixated lover, Harry Banks; at a confessional-poetry retreat at the home of Z. s glamorous nemesis, Braun Brown. Still, Annabelle remains loyal to Z., until Z. egregiously crosses the line.

From Annabelle and Z. to the painfully obscure Miss Jane Elliot, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath, Debra Weinstein s Apprentice to the Flower Poet Z. amounts to a joy ride through the world of poetry and the emergence of a great new comic voice.


From the Hardcover edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ballantine Books
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0812970942
• ISBN 13: 9780812970944
• Binding: Paperback