Among Women: Poems

by Jason Shinder

Overview

In Among Women, Shinder courageously explores men's fear of sexual intimacy using a personal, very private voice that whispers from the mire of lived human experience. In crisp, clean lines, the poems accurately convey the vulnerability, longing, and shame associated with the fear of human contact and communication. Sometimes achingly sensual, though never sentimental, Shinder treats this subject with daring and originality.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781555973209
Publisher:	Graywolf Press
Publication date:	03/01/2001
Pages:	112
Product dimensions:	5.64(w) x 9.72(h) x 0.33(d)

About the Author

Jason Shinder (1955–2008) was the author of three poetry collections and the editor of The Poem That Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later. He directed the YMCA National Writer's Voice and taught at the Writing Seminars at Bennington College.

Read an Excerpt

Among Women

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By Jason Shinder

Graywolf Press

Copyright © 2001 Jason Shinder
All right reserved.
ISBN: 1-55597-320-5

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Chapter One

Part of the Body It's not that her blouse isn't opening. If I say anything I'm a liar. It's just nobody lives here. Or it's late. Or I'm tired. Maybe lie down lightly or sideways, go back home before dinner. I can only bear one part of the body at a time, the fear the fear and the fear

Woman Undressing Sometimes I will stand up and leave. And, another time, I will remain but only stay so long. There's a moment I am mad with grief, seeing no one. Close my eyes and glimpse a glint of light lying down in a field. Because One Is Always Leaving Especially in the late afternoon, when my nieces close their eyes and bend their heads to inhale the bubbles that rise from the tall glasses of milk, licking the juice off their lips that open on the softened black-and-white cookies that have been dipped into the glass and then dipped again, sopping with cream, I like to think about stopping the passage of time - not a bird, not a branch in bloom, not an insect stirring in the still grasses and ferns.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Among Women by Jason Shinder Copyright © 2001 by Jason Shinder . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

I love these poems for their unbearable honesty. I love what these poems say and I love the form in which they say it. Jason Shinder is one of our finest new poets.” —Gerald Stern

“I don't know of any male poet who approximates the honest terror and desire, the sense of shock that runs through these poems . . . It is offensive to say that these poems are brave and yet they are brave. And also lyrical and grieving.” —Carol Muske-Dukes

“Here, in this astonishingly transparent collection, is a poet at his most permeable, most lucid, most luminous . . . Here is the heart and its opening and the rose and the bee and its sting.” —Lucie Brock-Broido

From the Publisher

The deliberate poems in Shinder's second volume of verse concentrate on masculinity, love and hetero sex accordingly they are also interested in embarrassment; in fathers, sons and families; in men's ideas about women; in self-discovery; and in self-inculpation. The poems' quiet language, slow pace and emotional pitch, like their short-lined, triadic stanzas, will remind many readers of Stephen Dunn's verse, and perhaps of Raymond Carver's. Those writers' fans may appreciate Shinder's frankness: "I'm afraid/ if I come/ I'll sound like someone// I don't know," he begins one poem; the next asks "Oh God of paradise,// whom/ have I ever loved/ except through me?" Some poems vouchsafe epiphanies; other chronicle absurd and touching sexual failures. Other still ask questions about love: "Have we ever arrived// in the arms of someone/ who wasn't lost/ from the start?" The deliberate clarity and accessibility tend toward stabs at Carver-esque profundity, and the results are often boring, and on occasion silly: "Ocean. Irene.// We are ocean./ Night. Irene./ We are night." Brought together from magazine publication, the poems seem here to be too much like one another, and too restricted in their forms and tones, to back up the best of the lot. While pitched as an antidote to the insistent (if now somewhat muted or ironized) chest-beating of most male-centered narrative verse, the poems end up bolstering the very categories they seek to question. (Apr.) Forecast: Shinder is the founder and director of the YMCA National Writer's Voice, director of the Sundance Institute's writing program, a writing teacher at Bennington College and New School University, and an indefatigable anthologist (he is series editor of the Best American Movie Writing and of a series of Harcourt collections of family poems) so this book should reach a variety of readers interested in his work. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

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