Floating City
From AwardAnnals
 | |
| Author(s) | Anne Pierson Wiese |
|---|---|
| Subtitle | Poems |
| Publisher | Louisiana State University Press |
| Honors | |
| Anne Pierson Wiese’s first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life’s routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place. Many are set in New York City, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate. When one dismisses from one’s mind the idea that going to the park, doing the laundry, buying a sandwich, and riding the subway are familiar experiences, one makes room for the actual to ally with the hypothetical by means of the emotions. The result, Wiese eloquently shows, is a form of truth that is silently generated whenever human beings earnestly endeavor to absorb the world. | |
“This remarkable book is proof that a light hand is the most masterful. Anne Pierson Wiese’s poems read so easily and pleasurably that one hardly realizes one has been confidently moved to a slightly different dimension, a world resembling ours but better observed, and quieter—in the best sense…. This is completely accomplished poetry of a very brave kind, daring to be immodestly good—modestly.”—Kay Ryan, from her judge’s citation
Anne Pierson Wiese’s first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life’s routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place. Many are set in New York City, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate. When one dismisses from one’s mind the idea that going to the park, doing the laundry, buying a sandwich, and riding the subway are familiar experiences, one makes room for the actual to ally with the hypothetical by means of the emotions. The result, Wiese eloquently shows, is a form of truth that is silently generated whenever human beings earnestly endeavor to absorb the world.
