f2f: Shorthand for "face-to-face," as in meeting someone in real life, flesh-to-flesh, as opposed to in the electronic world of cyberspace. Used in chat rooms and while instant messaging on the Internet.

At the core of this challenging new collection from Janet Holmes is the conceit of the sense of sight and the complex role it plays in women's self-identities and relationships.

Emily Dickinson is introduced as the iconic female writer who, unread in her time, is frequently misinterpreted and unheard. Holmes relates Dickinson's self-isolation to the writer's isolation from the reader and the intimacy of the act of reading. Echo, Eurydice, and Eros-other "E" figures, these mythological, their stories relying on seeing and being seen-are related by Holmes to twentieth-century counterparts manifesting as an anorexic, a flamboyant dresser, and a love god, respectively.

Holmes intersperses her meditation with the language of online text-messaging, employing it as a vehicle for probing the dual limitations and liberties afforded on-line correspondents. Through her correspondents' postings, we chart their relationship evolving without benefit of ever meeting or exchanging photographs, the participants deeply affected by the absence of the sense of sight. By turns provocative and timid, lyrical and terse, the voices in f2f exhibit myriad human reactions to how seeing each other influences how we behave.

About the Author

Janet Holmes is an award-winning poet who has published widely in journals and anthologies. Her poetry books include Green Tuxedo and Humanophone, also published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Reviews

"Janet Holmes' fourth poetry collection, F2F, explores how people communicate and how the loss of sight results in isolation. Holmes, who once worked in software development, bridges the language of technology with the language of poetry." -BookPleasures.com

"Drawing heavily from the compact linguistic style of modern text messaging, F2F (shorthand for 'face to face,' that is, meeting someone in real life rather than in cyberspace) draws both upon modern experience and upon classic dichotomies of myth as it represents the technological communications of love." -The Midwest Book Review

"In F2F, the word-wall between author and reader becomes a projection screen for a shadow-play of sad couplings-Echo and Narcissus, Eurydice and Orpheus, a pair of instant-messaging lovers. Be warned: the witty, techy feel of Holmes' writing is the flashy surface of a bruising vision of human interaction in which self-exposure is impossible and invisibility is punishingly lonely." -Catherine Wagner, author of Macular Hole and Miss America

"E, Echo, Eurydice, Emily and Eros-legacy resonance meets current disturbance f2f in Janet Holmes's melancholy music; reader, she addresses you, as she gently probes, pings, love life on the network." -Stephanie Strickland, author of V: WaveSon.nets/Losing L'una

"Holmes's attention to sound ("write with light / durable words indelible") is familiar poetic territory, but here it takes on new meaning because it so exceeds, or opposes, the text-messaging medium from which the language is drawn. This is like William Carlos Williams's experiments-or Bob Creeley's-in the excerpting and reframing of casual speech; the perception that a general method could be applied to a new, apparently unpromising and impoverished linguistic realm is one of the book's most forward brilliances." -Charles O. Hartman, Connecticut College

Book Information
ISBN 9780268030766
Author Janet Holmes
Format Paperback
Page Count 96
Imprint University of Notre Dame Press
Publisher University of Notre Dame Press
Weight(grams) 142g
Dimensions(mm) 229mm * 152mm * 5mm