Site Specific: New & Selected Poems
“Elaine Sexton enlarges on what Modernism observed,” writes Joyce Peseroff of Sexton’s fourth collection, Drive, pointing to the qualities and breadth of her work as an artist, editor, essayist, and poet. With Site Specific, Sexton’s new and selected poems, readers will witness the formation of a poet and artist whose work evolves thrillingly with each new publication.
Featuring selections from her first four books, Sleuth, Causeway, Prospect/Refuge, and Drive, as well as twenty-seven new and previously unpublished poems, Site Specific demonstrates how the poet’s early origin narratives become her materials for experimentation and artmaking. In the epigraph to her poem “Subjects Matter,” Sexton quotes Lucien Freud, “for me the paint is the person.” Here, the poems are the poet.
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Elaine Sexton’s poetry is furious and unstoppable—and it is all the more so because it insinuates itself into our consciousness with such love and exquisite tenderness. Underneath that tenderness, though, is a relentless will to forego the inessential, to take the measure of the real, to uncover the secret and silent engines of our human grief.”
“Elaine Sexton knows how to raise autobiography to the level of true poetry, and this knack has something to do with her use of surprise. Just when we think we know where one of her poems is going, we step into air. Sleuth leads us carefully into her life through a series of bracing verbal delights.”
“Sexton rejects a poetry of austerity, preciousness, formality or permanent rigid ‘commitment.’ …and what’s needlessly cumbersome. Instead, she prefers the quick study, the absolute freedom of the imagination to go where it wishes to go with individual agency.”
About the Author
Elaine Sexton is a maker, critic, teacher, and micro-publisher. Site Specific: New & Selected is her fifth collection of poetry. Her poems are widely anthologized and published in journals including American Poetry Review, Poetry, Ploughshares, and O! the Oprah Magazine. She has written the libretto for The Post Office, a chamber opera in poems, in collaboration with composer Laura Kaminsky, commissioned by Queen City Opera and developed by Opera Fusion: New Works/Cincinnati Opera. She lives in New York and teaches at the Sarah Lawrence College Writing Institute.
