Adrian Oktenberg (1947-2014) is the author of Swimming With Dolphins, two chapbooks, and numerous essays that appeared in Ploughshares, The Kenyon Revie, The Women's Review of Books and collections of literary criticism
A staggering work that, through the adept merging of journalistic
and poetic styles, succeeds in conveying the vastness and
complexity of Yugoslavia's dissolution, both on a national and a
personal level. The loss of a loved one, of a voice, of a personal
history-these come together to form the collective loss of a
moribund nation, and Oktenberg fearlessly and gracefully expresses
this by imbedding in the very structure of her lines the patterning
of loss and the visual representation of separations as they are
coming into existence.... [Oktenberg] lays the map of a fractured
nation like a transparency over broken communities and the
individuals composing those communities. This kind of imagery
essentially prohibits readers from maintaining an indifferent
perspective, bringing them so close to the genocide that it can no
longer remain a distant and vague outline of tragedy.--Tin
House
An important and heartbreaking book of poems.--Lambda Book
Report
The critic Helen Vendler, in her essay on Adrienne Rich... wrote
that 'the value of Rich's poems, ethically speaking, is that they
have continued to press against insoluble questions of suffering,
evil, love, justice and patriotism.' Oktenberg takes up and
continues this legacy, and her project is ambitious. For she is
describing genocide, not one remembered but the one currently going
on. I hope teachers will discover this book and use it. Paris
Press's design and layout of this book is impressively elegant,
befitting the elegiac tone. The press bills itself as producing
daring and beautiful feminist books, and this is one of them.--The
Iowa Review
A staggering work that, through the adept merging of journalistic
and poetic styles, succeeds in conveying the vastness and
complexity of Yugoslavia's dissolution, both on a national and a
personal level. The loss of a loved one, of a voice, of a personal
history-these come together to form the collective loss of a
moribund nation, and Oktenberg fearlessly and gracefully expresses
this by imbedding in the very structure of her lines the patterning
of loss and the visual representation of separations as they are
coming into existence.... [Oktenberg] lays the map of a fractured
nation like a transparency over broken communities and the
individuals composing those communities. This kind of imagery
essentially prohibits readers from maintaining an indifferent
perspective, bringing them so close to the genocide that it can no
longer remain a distant and vague outline of tragedy.--Tin
House
Oktenberg tears down our defences and forces us to confront the
terrible human realities of the minor war in Bosnia. Her breathless
poems seem almost without craft yet are, in fact, painstakingly
achieved; not a word in them is wasted. Together, they constitute
an an artifact that is as important a human document as a poetic
one.--Booklist
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