EBOOK
About
A vibrant and eclectic collection from a stunningly mature young poet.
"The world-the time has come to say it, though the news will not be welcome to everyone, has no intention of abandoning enchantment altogether." Roberto Calasso's words in Literature and the Gods remind us that, in an age of reason, of mechanization, of alienation, of rote drudgery, we still seek out the transcendent, the marvelous. Ange Mlinko's luminous collection is both a journey toward and the space of that very enchantment.
Marvelous Things Overheard takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about the lands of the Mediterranean. Mlinko, who lived at the American University of Beirut and traveled to Greece and Cyprus, has penned poems that seesaw between the life lived in those ancient and strife-torn places, and the life imagined through its literature: from The Greek Anthology to the Mu'allaqat. Throughout, Mlinko grapples with the passage of time on two levels: her own aging (alongside the growing up of her children) and the incontrovertible evidence of millennia of human habitation.
This is an assured and revealing collection, one that readers will want to seek refuge in again and again.
"The world-the time has come to say it, though the news will not be welcome to everyone, has no intention of abandoning enchantment altogether." Roberto Calasso's words in Literature and the Gods remind us that, in an age of reason, of mechanization, of alienation, of rote drudgery, we still seek out the transcendent, the marvelous. Ange Mlinko's luminous collection is both a journey toward and the space of that very enchantment.
Marvelous Things Overheard takes its title from a collection of ancient rumors about the lands of the Mediterranean. Mlinko, who lived at the American University of Beirut and traveled to Greece and Cyprus, has penned poems that seesaw between the life lived in those ancient and strife-torn places, and the life imagined through its literature: from The Greek Anthology to the Mu'allaqat. Throughout, Mlinko grapples with the passage of time on two levels: her own aging (alongside the growing up of her children) and the incontrovertible evidence of millennia of human habitation.
This is an assured and revealing collection, one that readers will want to seek refuge in again and again.
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Reviews
"The merely competent should study Mlinko's work with envy. It's as alive to sound as to social complexity. . . You hear Paul Muldoon, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Wallace Stevens in her poems, but as raw material transformed into something more than an amalgam of influence."
Michael Robbins, The Chicago Tribune
"Mlinko treats the reader to lines that feel both alive and spectral."
The Paris Review Daily
"It's hard not to fall in love with a poet who can turn the lost colony of Roanoke and the Dutch tulipomania bubble of the 1630s into forgotten fairy tales . . . Even an excess of charm can't diminish the ravishing intelligence of this fervent, loose-limbed, sprightly book."
William Logan, The New Criterion