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| February 2009 |
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88 pages
6 x 8.5 |
| 9780822960171 |
| Paper $14.95 Add to cart |
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| All-Night Lingo Tango | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Hamby, Barbara | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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This collection is a love letter to language with poems that are drunk and filled with references to the hyperkinetic world of the twenty-first century. Yet Zeus and Hera tangle with Leda on the interstate; Ava Gardner becomes a Hindu princess; and Shiva, the Destroyer, reigns over all. English is the primary god here, with its huge vocabulary and omnivorous gluttony for new words, yet the mystery of the alphabet is behind everything, a funky puppet master who can make a new world out of nothing.
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| Barbara Hamby is writer-in-residence at Florida State University. She is the author of two chapbooks and three previous poetry collections: The Alphabet of Desire; Delirium; and Babel, winner of the 2003 Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications including the Paris Review, the Iowa Review, the Kenyon Review, and Best American Poetry 2000. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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“Scant verbiage cannot rise to the occasion of these brilliantly overbrimming, beautifully bountiful, life-stuffed, word-smart, unconstrained but strangely formal, wise and wicked and zaftig lovelies. They turn 'wretched excess' to 'blessed excess' and declare a new physics of plenitude.”—Albert Goldbarth “As the poet has discovered for herself, NOTHING succeeds like excess. Her poems have taught me how to be happy while hysterical, or even just how to be hysterical without tears. Who else could get me there so fast, so far, so fastidious? Seriously, the All-Night Lingo Tango is the way out even before dark, and I cherish every disyllabic slur: baa baa, Barbara, have you any bull? The answer is yes sir, yes sir, nobody's fool.”—Richard Howard “With its hyperintensity of imagery, humor, and substance sustained throughout, All Night Lingo Tango is a whirling genius of a book.”—Susan Hahn “Chatty and whimsical, literary and (at its best) laugh-out-loud funny.” —Publishers Weekly “Strap on your dancing shoes before opening Barbara Hamby’s fourth collection ‘All-Night Lingo Tango.’ The language is lush and erotic, as Hamby trips from one allusion and image to another so fast the reader is left breathless and fiddy.” —Tallahassee Democrat “Swiveling, strumming, and slicing through air like an intimate Alvin Ailey ensemble, Hamby exhales a world the shape of associated conditions and intimate emotions out of her carefully chosen words. The poems are individually stunning. Collected together, they dance.”—Barnes & Noble Review “Reading Barbara Hamby is like savoring a fine multi-course meal. Her poems are thick and meaty, filled with savory details, but full of subtle nuances only realized on multiple reads. She fuses humor, pop culture, literature, travel, and romance in an ebullient mix.”—Bomb Magazine “Barbara Hamby triple-somersaults, dives, flips, and swings from rung to rung high over our heads on the flying trapeze. . . . Don’t miss [All-Night Lingo Tango] . . . It’s a perfect gift to yourself.” —Portland Writing Examiner close
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