Public Abstract: Poems - Hardcover

Huffman, Jane

Hardcover

ISBN 13: 9798987585207

Publisher: American Poetry Review, 2023

Synopsis

Winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and selected by judge Dana Levin, Public Abstract is an intricate debut that examines illness and recovery, addiction and loss.

Winner of the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Jane Huffman's intricate debut collection, Public Abstract, examines illness and recovery, loss and addiction: the ripples of influence an addict has on their family circle, and vice versa. We watch as a private mind, devoted to its privacy, is laid out on the page and abstracted to become a public revelation. Building an aesthetic of compressed interiority, the speaker's tension is clear—“From one lung, I tell the truth. / From the other lung, I lie." Through intimate and meticulous poems, Public Abstract explores the operations of form, sewn together, and the failings of form, ripped apart. Crumbling under its own weight and folderol, form becomes an act of invention and in Huffman's expert hands, revision becomes a genre.

About this title

About the Author

About the Author

Jane Huffman is a poet from Michigan. She received an MFA from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and is currently a doctoral student at the University of Denver. A recipient of the 2019 Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation, Huffman is founder and editor-in-chief of Guesthouse, an online literary journal.

About the Judge

Dana Levin's newest book of poetry Now Do You Know Where You Are (Copper Canyon Press 2022) was named one of the "Best Books of 2022" by NPR and was included on the New York Times "100 Notable Books of 2022" list. Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was chosen by Louise Glück for the 1999 APR/Honickman First Book Prize and went on to receive numerous honors, including the 2003 PEN/Osterweil Award. Copper Canyon Press brought out her second book, Wedding Day, in 2005, and in 2011 Sky Burial, which The New Yorker called “utterly her own and utterly riveting."

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Public Abstract

I swept

and am

sweeping, have

slept

and am sleeping.

I heaved the head

of the mop

to the hod

and I'm heaving.

I'm

sweating,

I'm wetting

the corn

of my broom.

I'm

washing

the floor

in the room

where I

waited for

reason.

I reasoned,

I teased

at the

edges of

reason.

Spirometry

I am under-interpreting my symptoms, the doctor says.

I have grown accustomed to them, and so I no longer interpret

them as abnormal. My account can no longer be trusted.

I watch his screens from inside the glass box. On one monitor,

green lines tick against a dark backdrop. On another, a cursor

draws absentmindedly, making the shape of a bread roll.

Now do it, the doctor says, as if you're breathing against a

brick wall. On a third monitor, a dark circle expands and

contracts like a pulsing eyespot. Air buckles in the back of

my mouth.

So it says here you teach writing, the doctor says, here

at the University. His intonation makes it a question,

although it is not. The machine beeps, and I exhale fast and

hard

until my lungs are bottomed out. I'm so in love with interpretation

that I'm blue in the face from kissing it.

Edition details

• Publisher: American Poetry Review
• Publication date: 2023
• Language: English
• ISBN 13: 9798987585207
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 96