Aggregate of Disturbances

Publication Year: 2004

In Aggregate of Disturbances, Michele Glazer confronts the slipperiness of language and perception as she probes natural processes—the lives of insects, the uncertainty of love, and the deaths of human beings. Nature’s beauty interests Glazer less than the fact that it is chaotic, amoral, redundant, charming, and indifferent to human concern—qualities that are, in these poems, turned into another kind of beauty. “The stalk was knocked flat &the allium’s great lavender sphere / kissed the dirt &in the aftermath the pendulous blossomed / tip bobbed like a wand madly attempting to enchant-enchant-enchant. / / I wanted to believe that it happened to amuse me.”

These taut lyrical poems negotiate between desire for something irrefutable and an uneasy bedrock of paradox. In the interstices, Aggregate of Disturbances breaks open language and experience to offer a glimpse of “the eye on the other side.”

Published by: University of Iowa Press

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Book Details

E-ISBN-13: 9781587294792
E-ISBN-10: 1587294796
Print-ISBN-13: 9780877458784
Print-ISBN-10: 0877458782

Page Count: 68
Publication Year: 2004

Series Title: Iowa Poetry Prize

Aggregate of Disturbances

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents [Includes Acknowledgments]

2 Blinds & a Bittern

Part 1

Wherein space is constructed that matter may reside in . . .

Matter

A Small Infidelity

Firefly

box

On So

Part 2

Translucencies, her death

Part 3

Letter

Conjunctions

Drive

Ad Infinitum

Real Life #11: Hummingbird

John Is in the Next Room

Inscape

Part 4

Echo to Narcissus

Real Life #14: Vagaries

Woman Sitting for a Portrait at a Warehouse Sale

Sonnet

The Mathematics of Fire

Feathers

Early Romance: Japanese Garden (in the heart of the city)

The sculptor muses on his black-billed magpie

Valediction

Fragment’s Song

Moon Casings

Part 5

Map

Historic House, Astoria

Happy

The Fecundity

Home

The Infinite Imperative

Lament

Home Is a Stone House

Research Areas

Recommend

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