The series of poems in Maxine Chernoff's Without are elegiac brushstrokes, each somewhat feathery and brushing in more than one direction, which creates tension and unexpected arrivals as well as departures: someone or something is missing. Parts of the world are wavering and parts have disappeared. What remains is treated in the subtle management of the lines without a hint of punctuation, which allows for "waves" of attention, as meaning rises and subsides. The emotional impact is powerful, as are the recognitions, such as "when darkness loses / its waiting mirror / and tuning forks / stand in for solace" and "readers asleep /mouthing their dreams / fears of whispering / become a creed / until life blurs / like any lens /that fails at attention." There's a sense of meaning passing with the solidity and darkness of time.

About the Author
Maxine Chernoff is a professor and Chair of the Creative Writing program at San Francisco State University. She is the author of six books of fiction and twelve books of poetry, most recently World (Salt, 2001), Evolution of the Bridge (Salt, 2003), Among the Names (Apogee Press, 2005) and The Turning (Apogee, 2008). Of the latter, Cole Swenson said, "exploring complexities of "the gift," Chernoff's is an economy of the uncanny - each exchange is strikingly new." Of The Turning (Apogee Press, 2008), poet Gillian Conoley said, "In stanzas taut as guitar strings, - these poems recall a kind of classic Ahkmatovan cry - combined with a Tsvetaeva-like pluckiness, all of which gets overridden by Chernoff's supreme humanitiy, ferocity, intelligence, wit, honesty." Her collection of stories, Signs of Devotion (Simon and Schuster, 1993), was a New York Times Notable Book.Both her novel American Heaven (Coffee House Press, 1996) and her book of short stories, Some of Her Friends That Year (Coffee House Press, 2002), were finalists for the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award. With Paul Hoover, she edits the journal New American Writing and translated The Selected Poems of Friedrich Holderlin, (Omnidawn, 2008), which received the 2009 Pen American Translation Award. She has read her poetry in Belgium, England, Australia, Germany, Brazil, Scotland, China, the Czech Republic, Greece, and Russia.


Book Information
ISBN 9781848611962
Author Maxine Chernoff
Format Paperback
Page Count 86
Imprint Shearsman Books
Publisher Shearsman Books
Weight(grams) 121g
Dimensions(mm) 216mm * 140mm * 5mm