Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting (Thinking Literature)

An audacious account of what happens when forgetting becomes a way of writing and writing becomes a way of forgetting. In Slips of the Mind, poet and critic Jennifer Soong turns away from forgetting's longstanding associations with suppression, privation, and error to argue that the absence or failure of memory has often functioned as a generative creative principle. Exploring forgetting not as the mere rejection of a literary past or a form of negative poetics, Soong puts to the test its very aesthetic meaning. What new structures, forms of desires, styles, and long and short feelings do lapses in time allow? What is oblivion's relationship to composition? And how does the twentieth-century poet come to figure as the quintessential embodiment of such questions? Soong uncovers forgetting's influence on Gertrude Stein, Lyn Hejinian, Tan Lin, Harryette Mullen, Lissa Wolsak, and New York School poets John Ashbery, James Schuyler, Bernadette Mayer, and Ted Berrigan, among others. She reveals that forgetting's shapeshifting produces differences in poetic genre, interest, and degrees of intentionality--and that such malleability is part of forgetting's nature. Most provocatively, Soong shows how losing track of things, leaving them behind, or finding them already gone resists overdetermination and causality in the name of surprise, as poets leverage forgetting in order to replace identity with style. Slips of the Mind is the kind of literary criticism that will reward all readers of modern and contemporary poetry.

Literature & Fiction

Soong, Jennifer

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

Swaying between command and curiosity, acquiescence and destruction, distance and proximity, Jennifer Soong's Suede Mantis / Soft Rage proffers tenderness that teeters on the precipice of loss. Premised on this peril is not a paralyzing grief but a generative poiesis of "cruel desperation," in which poetry pronounces itself in contrasts and conditionals, had beens and renunciations. Like a tongue that tans flesh, like passion that's made pliable by the pulsing and glistening of language, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage is the negotiated labor of a process rather than a product, raising interior operations to the surface while presenting an antithesis to mimetic construction. Neo-romantic and post-pastoral, the poems in Soong's second collection reinvigorate lyric possibility. "As I try to make way through, but ultimately fall--or slide--down the ruins of empire toward what feels like a fast-approaching yet ever more uncertain end, I am finding myself in increasing, practical need of books like Jennifer Soong's Suede Mantis / Soft Rage. With its acid love balladry, affirmational pessimism, and percipient, angular grief, it slows, it is slowing me, down, sharpening my faculties, reintegrating my mind into and, even better, out of itself."--Brandon Shimoda, author of The Desert "In The Words of Selves, Denise Riley writes that the 'self-describing I produces an unease which can't be mollified by any theory of its constructed nature,' and this seems to be the problem that is at the center of Jennifer Soong's engaging second collection. Beginning with a renunciation and then building upon a foundation of dazzling lyric and uncanny koans, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage practices a ranging formal hunger in an environment where the speaker calmly declares 'the object of my life faces the objection of my world.' Soong's poems recall Riley's exquisite verses, certainly, but they also recall the assured, autonomous density of Lissa Wolsak's work, in that their language surprises and baffles, drives into pastoral ecstasy and bleak enstasy. 'The solar pulses beat brilliantly through the trees,' but to 'learn to write it terribly,' we must remember that there is 'no destruction without self- / no destruction without self- / difficulties.' There is a gulf between abolition of self and explosion of self, and Soong's vivid poetry is suspended above that chasm, hovering as if by obscenity or miracle or both."--Ted Rees, author of Dog Day Economy "A series of lyric refractions which wrangle a self and the experience of the world into language, Jennifer Soong's Suede Mantis / Soft Rage engages with poetry's incorrigible taste for plurality, its mutations and re-productions. By turns arch, expansive, and direct, and negotiating the footwork of pronouns, Suede Mantis / Soft Rage works toward the extraordinary understanding that love's poetics might resolve themselves purely as an undoing, a study of unraveled ends, as effacements in the direction of paradise."--Imogen Cassels, author of Chesapeake Poetry.

Suede Mantis / Soft Rage

Poetry

Black Sun Lit

Poetry. Asian &amp; Asian American Studies. Women's Studies. Art. NEAR, AT follows the inherent strangeness of one's consciousness as it observes and comes into contact with the physical world. A sustained exploration of language, capitalism, gender, and nature, NEAR, AT traverses and measures the movement of silence against the movement of thought and its pauses. Divided into five parts, each with its own form, and followed by a series of ongoing love poems called "My Christopher Poems," this debut collection is slow to assume but quick to adjust. Rooted in both the traditional and the experimental, it asks just how little of ourselves we can be. "Jennifer Soong's collection displays her nuanced understanding of how the philosophical-treatise-as-poem can birth an emotional and embodied intelligence, placing her in a line of affinity with contemporary writers such as Lyn Hejinian, Lisa Robertson and Anne Boyer."--Mia You "In these poems 'the mind is a guest,' though the bodies of reader &amp; writer are never simply at rest, but dance on the rhythms of a language (or, better, languages) that keep teaching us new steps."--Pierre Joris "...uniquely tender: weird, wired records of affection, that daily fever."--Graham Foust "This book demonstrates a physicist's logic, like texting a friend to say you're 'at' your destination, when in actuality you are near, but in actual actuality you will be there, at the agreed-upon place, by the time they reach you."--Monica McClure

Near, At

Arts & Photography

Futurepoem Books

COMEBACK DEATH, Jennifer Soong's third book, weaves its registers of what Soong names as "dread, gender, sarcasm, sublimation of pain, fruit, ambition, and fecundity" through an English which is not only polyvocal but uncannily porous. Its languages (English, Russian, German, ancient Greek) underscore a perverse pastoral range that somehow bridges Oxford, New Jersey, and Lesbos. With a ferocity both musical and analytic, Soong's third book offers an unprecedented set of tonalities for immense architectures of feeling. "In COMEBACK DEATH, Jennifer Soong dramatizes one of the key problems of our time, and indeed any time, which is how to reorganize the (negative) affects structuring intersubjectivity and thus conditioning our capacity to act in a common interest among others."--Thom Donovan Poetry.

Comeback Death

Krupskaya

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Soong, Jennifer. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Soong, Jennifer

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Soong, Jennifer. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting (Thinking Literature)

Slips of the Mind: Poetry as Forgetting (Thinking Literature)

Suede Mantis / Soft Rage

Near, At

Comeback Death