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  • Luca: Discourse on Life and Death

    Rochelle Owens

     


    220 pages perfectbound
    $20.00
    ISBN 1-881523-12-8


  • Rochelle Owens’ writing, here as elsewhere, is sui generis. ...Immensely learned, sophisticated, and witty in its conceits, this Discourse on Life and Death demands two kinds of reading. First, it should be read through from beginning to end as if it were a novel. ...But a second reading is required to note the poem’s microstructure–its superb modulation of rhythms and internal rhymes, its ironies and paradoxes. It is the layering of cultures and especially of myths, including our own contemporary myths of the Great Creative Genius (always male), creating beauty out of the detritus around him, that makes Luca so distinctive. Watch out, Owens seems to be saying, for those high-minded claims and take another look at the evidence of actual life–”a stream of molten lava burning,” “doses of nitrogen muscle saliva,” or even “the seams/ of a discarded wallet.”
        - from Marjorie Perloff's introduction