Wednesday, November 07, 2012

What is Jehanne Dubrow reading?

The current featured contributor at Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow, author of Red Army Red.

Her entry begins:
The last time I wrote for the “Writers Read” blog, I was working on my fourth book, Red Army Red, a collection of poems about my childhood and adolescence in Cold War-era Poland; at the time, my reading list was full of books on the subject of Communism and the Iron Curtain. Now, I’m in the middle of drafting The Arranged Marriage, a book of prose poems that mythologizes my mother’s Jewish-Latina upbringing in Honduras, El Salvador, and southern Florida. Because I usually work in traditional forms like the sonnet or the villanelle, this new project has led me to study up on the history and craft of prose poetry.

Michel Delville’s The American Prose Poem has served as a great introduction. The book covers the development and establishment of the form within American poetics, including the influence of the avant-garde, the role of Modernism, and the connection between prose poetry and...[read on]
About Red Army Red, from the publisher:
Displaying a sure sense of craft and a sharp facility for linking personal experience to the public realms of history and politics, Jehanne Dubrow’s Red Army Red chronicles the coming of age of a child of American diplomats in Eastern Europe in the 1980s. In the last moments of the Cold War, Poland—the setting for many of the poems—lurches fitfully from a society characterized by hardship and deprivation toward a free-market economy. The contradictions and turmoil generated by this transition are the context in which an adolescent girl awakens to her sexuality. With wit and subtlety, Dubrow makes apparent the parallels between the body and the body politic, between the fulfillment of individual and collective desires.
Learn more about the book and author at Jehanne Dubrow's website and blog.

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow (April 2010).

Writers Read: Jehanne Dubrow.

--Marshal Zeringue