View from the Hôtel de l’Étoile by Rebecca Manery

(1 customer review)

$14.99

 

“’We never pause to wonder/whether we chose our myths or/were created by them’ observes the author of this bright, humane, beguiling collection. Speakers in these poems inhabit and re-ignite archetypes like Penelope, Desdemona and Persephone, providing uncannily fresh and sometimes upended perspectives on who they were, and thus, who we might be. When Daphne, for example, was turned into a tree, we are told ‘she attained a rare freedom.’ Via these poems, we experience sensations that span centuries. In one wonderful poem, a moth, trapped behind the glass in an old religious painting, expires ‘exempt from ascension.’ Full of illuminating takes on symbols, ekphrasis, astronomy and more, these poems are dreamy, searching, celestial.”

—Amy Gerstler, 2015 National Book Award finalist and winner of the 1991 National Book Critic’s Circle Award

Rating: ***** [5 of 5 Stars!]

 

Occasionally, one encounters a poetry collection that convinces you of the beauty of a flashing intellect. Such is Rebecca Manery’s View from the Hotel  de l’Etoile. Wherever she casts her eyes, one believes in the brilliance of language that exalts and venerates our cultural, mythic, and literary inheritance while also singing bravely a singular life whose largesse is a mix of the imagination, desire, and freedom.

-Major Jackson, author of Roll Deep and Leaving Saturn, finalist for the 2002 National Book Critics’ Circle Award

 

 

Rebecca Manery has the rare and wonderful gift of precision combined with precision’s wild undercurrents. These poems are as shaped as they are agile, as occasionally casual in tone as they are musically impeccable—the marriages out of which true poetry is born. This chapbook brings the reader into Manery’s world of art, history, wonder, intrigue, and insight, and with these poems she carries us out of the ordinary into illumination. This is a collection to return to for the thrill and the reassurance of poetry’s power again and again.

-Laura Kasischke, author of Space in Chains, winner of the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry

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Description

View from the Hôtel de l’Étoile

by Rebecca Manery 

$14.99, paper

Rebecca Manery is completing a dissertation on creative writing pedagogy for a Ph.D. in English and Education from the University of Michigan. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Bennington College, an MA in Literacy Education from Northeastern Illinois University, and a BA in English from Michigan State University. She has taught undergraduate courses in creative writing and composition at the University of Michigan, graduate and undergraduate courses in literacy education at Northeastern Illinois University, professional development workshops for the Chicago Teachers’ Center, and a continuing education course on the plays of the Court Theatre season at the University of Chicago. She has also served as an Arts in Education Director, dramaturg, teacher, and writer for numerous professional theatres and theatre-related organizations in New York City and Chicago including New Dramatists, Pan Asian Repertory Theatre, A.R.T/New York, Court Theatre, Stage Left Theatre, Chicago Dramatists, the Theatre Department of Loyola University of Chicago, Steppenwolf Theatre and Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Her research on creative writing pedagogy has been published in New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing. With Stephanie Vanderslice, she is the editor of the forthcoming 10th anniversary edition of Can Creative Writing Really Be Taught? Resisting Lore in Creative Writing Pedagogy from Bloomsbury Press. A passionate believer that creative writing and other arts are fundamental human practices, she has founded and facilitated community workshops to support the development of writers of all ages.

 

1 review for View from the Hôtel de l’Étoile by Rebecca Manery

  1. AD Nauman –

    This is an astonishing collection of poetry, truly. I read one poem, then have to put the book down for a day to think about what I read, so packed with meaning and beauty.

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