Description
The ascetic and enigmatic vastness of the Great Basin has challenged the talents of many writers, but few have met the challenge as successfully as William L. Fox. In Reading Sand, Fox's elegant minimalist poems capture the essence of the Great Basin desert-its daunting emptiness, the passage of light and wind across its surfaces, its colors and textures, its silence. In ""perforated object,"" the collection's central piece, Fox uses a mysterious pierced-horn artifact discovered in Nevada's Humboldt Cave as the subject of an extended meditation on the nature of history and the absolute inscrutability of the Great Basin's complex past. The result is an intellectually provocative and aesthetically moving work of a lean grandeur rarely found in recent poetry. Fox, whose profound and insightful essays on the Great Basin have found many readers, is here at the top of his form as a poet. In Reading Sand, the Great Basin has found a voice both terse and eloquent, a voice worthy of this grand subject.
About the Author
William L. Fox is the author of six nonfiction books on the cultural geography of the American Southwest, more than a dozen books of poetry, and is currently at work on a book about scientific and artistic images of the Antarctic. His poems have appeared in more than 60 magazines and journals, and he edited the West Coast Poetry Review for many years. He is the Western States Arts Federation literature consultant.
Reviews
"Reading Sand is a beautifully spare, minimal, and serially progressive sequence of poems...Fox's poetry forces the reader to pause, to re-engage with the spare essentials of existence, and to rebuild a tentious yet miraculous vision of the world." -Arthur Sze "Fox has invented a form equal to his subject, a form both radically austere and musical, a form more compelling, emotionally expressive, and seemingly necessary than I have seen in contemporary American poems for some time." -Forrest Gander
Book Information
ISBN 9780874174984
Author University of Nevada Press
Format Paperback
Page Count 128
Imprint University of Nevada Press
Publisher University of Nevada Press
Weight(grams) 170g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 140mm * 9mm
About the Author
William L. Fox is the author of six nonfiction books on the cultural geography of the American Southwest, more than a dozen books of poetry, and is currently at work on a book about scientific and artistic images of the Antarctic. His poems have appeared in more than 60 magazines and journals, and he edited the West Coast Poetry Review for many years. He is the Western States Arts Federation literature consultant.
Reviews
"Reading Sand is a beautifully spare, minimal, and serially progressive sequence of poems...Fox's poetry forces the reader to pause, to re-engage with the spare essentials of existence, and to rebuild a tentious yet miraculous vision of the world." -Arthur Sze "Fox has invented a form equal to his subject, a form both radically austere and musical, a form more compelling, emotionally expressive, and seemingly necessary than I have seen in contemporary American poems for some time." -Forrest Gander
Book Information
ISBN 9780874174984
Author University of Nevada Press
Format Paperback
Page Count 128
Imprint University of Nevada Press
Publisher University of Nevada Press
Weight(grams) 170g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 140mm * 9mm
