Bücher von Janet Holmes

Janet Holmes's second book of poems explores and interrogates the quotidian life of the late twentieth century for what exists behind its often seductive appearance. In these poems we see beneath acceptable, sleek surfaces into the turbulence they often conceal, as the splendid green tuxedo of the title may disguise a heart that harbors racism, fear, and violence. Holmes exhorts us to look beyond the face value of what presents itself, to resist literal interpretations, and to plumb the many depths afforded by each encounter with the world outside ourselves. In the second half of The Green Tuxedo, Holmes draws on recently discovered diaries kept by her journalist father nearly fifty years before her birth. Sifting through evidence and memory, she entwines actual diary entries (such as a seventy-seven-name list of "Wild Women I Have Known") with speculation and invention to generate a portrait that discovers him- re-invents him-as a young man. This sequence, searching and elegiac, affords closure to a book whose questionings suggest less a need for absolute answers than a declaration of the need to explore. Holmes leads us through a world of appearances, celebrating the necessary examination of what is concealed.

Johnson, a poet, simply removed the words he did not wish to use as if whiting them out - the remaining words stood in the same relationship to each other as they did in the original poem. This collection of poems uses that method.

Introduces Emily Dickinson as the iconic female writer who, unread in her time, is frequently misinterpreted and unheard. This work relates Dickinson's self-isolation to the writer's isolation from the reader and the intimacy of the act of reading. It exhibits myriad human reactions to how seeing each other influences how we behave.