Monica
Youn
Ignatz
Four Way Books
ABOUT THE BOOK
Ignatz takes the form
of a cycle of love poems—in radical variations—based
on Ignatz Mouse, the rodent anti-hero and love-object
of George Herriman's classic comic strip Krazy Kat.
For decades, Krazy Kat rang the changes on
a quirky theme of unrequited love: cat loves mouse;
mouse hates cat; mouse hits cat with brick; cat mistakes
brick for love; and so on, day after day. The backgrounds
of the strip were in constant inexplicable flux: a desiccated
specimen of Arizona flora morphs in the next panel into
a crescent moon, then into a snowcapped butte, while
the characters chatted obliviously on, caught up in
their own obsessive round.
Moving through pacy, overflowing
sentences, enigmatic aphoristic observations, and pointed
imagistic vignettes, Youn’s second collection
vividly captures the way the world reorients around
an object of desire: the certainty that your lover “will
appear in the west, backlit by orange isinglass,”
the ability to intuit a lover’s presence from
the way “unseen flutes / keep whistling the curving
phrases of your body.” Youn skillfully draws on
the repeating narrative motifs and haunting landscapes
of Krazy Kat as she tests and surpasses the
limits of lyric to explore the cyclical elements of
romanticized love, where one hides “in the coolness
I had stolen // from the brass rods of your bed.”
Ignatz speaks to and with her poetic forbears,
whether St. John Perse, whose phrase “robed in
the loveliest robe of the year” (T.S. Eliot’s
translation) recurs in several love songs to Ignatz,
or Geoffrey Hill, whose Mercian Hymns these
poems recall in their serial structure and their commingling
of the contemporary and classical.
A poignant foray into the inventive
possibilities of obsession and passion, Ignatz
offers precisely-observed snapshots—or, rather,
comic-strip panels—which speak volumes about poetry,
love, lyric—and, of course, poor old Krazy Kat.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Monica Youn is an attorney
at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University
School of Law, where she is the Director of the Money
in Politics project. She has been awarded poetry fellowships
from the Library of Congress, the Rockefeller Foundation,
and Stanford University, and has taught creative writing
at Pratt Institute and Columbia University. Her first
collection, Barter, was published by Graywolf
Press in 2003.
SUGGESTED LINKS
Monica Youn's Wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monica_Youn
Monica Youn's webpage at the
Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/people/monica_youn
AUTHOR APPEARANCES
Wed November 3rd 7pm
Moonstone Arts Center Philadelphia
Thursday, November 4th 7-9pm
McNally Jackson Book Store 52 Prince St. NYC The Four
Way Books Annual Launch Monica Youn, Debra Allbery,
Priscilla Becker, Megan Staffel, Daniel Tobin
Wed Nov 10th 11am
Pomona College 11am
Wed Nov 10th 4:30 pm
UC San Diego
Friday Nov 12
California College of the Arts
November 22
KGB NYC 7:30 pm Monica Youn & Rosmarie Waldrop
December 13
11th St Bar NYC 7pm James Richardson, Kathleen Graber
& Monica Youn
EXCERPT
“Ignatz Invoked”
from IGNATZ by Monica Youn © 2010. Reprinted
by permission of Four Way Books. All rights reserved.
IGNATZ INVOKED
A gauze bandage wraps the land
and is unwound, stained orange with sulfates.
A series of slaps molds a mountain,
a fear uncoils itself, testing its long
cool limbs. A passing cloud
seizes up like a carburetor
and falls to earth, lies broken-
backed and lidless in the scree.
Acetylene torches now snug
in their holsters, shop-vacs
trundled back behind the dawn.
A mist becomes a murmur, becomes
a moan rising from dust-
choked fissures in the rock O pity us
Ignatz O come to us by
moonlight
O arch your speckled body over the earth.
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