Waterwork by Sarah Riggs

Description

Poetry

2007

“In five stunning sequences, Sarah Riggs has created a poetics of elastic migrations that imagines the world as clusters, skeins, and motions whose innate peril is miraculously saved in hte act of naming: ‘each name for a thing seems intent to curl from its shelled meaning.’ Places, histories, persons, myth and object, intimacy and incident, are precision shorelines of simultaneous apprehension and erasure. In this subtle and luminous first book, Sarah Riggs has engaged our most fundamental quandaries in a poetry that announces, in Stevens’ phrase, ‘a new knowledge of reality.’”—Ann Lauterbach

“[Riggs] turns her acute eye to contemporary culture as well as natural history and her ear to the subtle balances of rhythm and assonance. The result is a beautiful attention that illuminates nuance, making the everyday world more detailed and thus more grand.”—Cole Swensen

Sarah Riggs is the author of WATERWORK (Chax Press, 2007), Chain of Miniscule Decisions in the Form of a Feeling (Reality Street Editions, 2007), 60 TEXTOS (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010), 36 Blackberries (Juge Editions), and . Her book of essays, Word Sightings: Poetry and Visual Media in Stevens, Bishop, and O’Hara was published by Routledge in 2002. She has translated or co-translated from the French the poets Isabelle Garron, Marie Borel, Etel Adnan, Ryoko Sekiguchi, and, most recently, Oscarine Bosquet. Several of Riggs’s books of poetry have appeared in French translations by Françoise Valéry and others, with the publishers Éditions de l’attente and Le Bleu du ciel. A member of the bilingual poetry collective Double Change and founder of the interart non-profit Tamaas, she divides her time between the U.S. coasts and Paris, where she is a professor at NYU-in-France.