Video from the 2009 National
Book Awards Finalist Reading
Photo credit: Diana
Michener
CITATION
Or to Begin Again,
Ann Lauterbach’s eighth book of poetry, creates
a world of permeability and fragment in contemporary
lights and darks, in which what is visible entwines
with what can be said, and what can be said is reality.
The book’s central narrative, “Alice in
the Wasteland,” is a high philosophical inquiry
that’s mobile, capacious, and tender, veering
from sibylline to ingénue’s pathos. Yearning
is to make cohere.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Ann Lauterbach’s book
work of poetry, Or to Begin Again, takes its
name from a sixteen-poem elegy that resists its own
end as it meditates on the nearness of specific attachment
and loss against the mute background of historical forces
in times of war. In the center of the book is a long
narrative, “Alice in the Wasteland,” inspired
by Lewis Carroll’s great character and T.S. Eliot’s
1922 modernist poem. Alice is accosted by an invisible
Voice as she wanders and wonders about the nature of
language in relation to perception. In this volume,
Lauterbach again shows the range of her formal inventiveness,
demonstrating the visual dynamics of the page in tandem
with the powerful musical cadences and imagery of a
contemporary master.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ann Lauterbach is the author
of eight collections of poetry, including If in
Time: Selected Poems 1975 – 2000, and a collection
of essays, The Night Sky: Writings on the Poetics
of Experience. She has taught at Brooklyn College,
Columbia, Iowa, Princeton, and at the City College of
New York and Graduate Center of CUNY. Since 1991 she
has been Director of Writing in the Milton Avery School
of the Arts at Bard College, where she has been, since
1999, Ruth and David Schwab II Professor of Languages
and Literature. Lauterbach was the recipient of a John
D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship in 1993. She
lives in Germantown, New York.
