Standing Water

ISBN: 0374536864

Author: Chai, Eleanor

Condition: New

A profound literary debut that recounts a childs singular storySince I made you, you mayimagine I set myself on fire-or better, say: you lit the funeral pyrefrom ten thousand days away.A young woman in Paris encounters an uncanny presence on a tour of a small museum. A study by Rodin of the dancer Little Hanako-titled Head of Sorrow-triggers in the young woman recognition of her mother, a mother erased from her life since childhood.Thus begins Eleanor Chais Standing Water, one of the most remarkable first books of poetry in recent years. It is a journey into the past as well as the present-into the narrative hidden from the poet since birth, as well as the strategies that she has adopted to survive. It is a journey about how we learn to cope with, to perceive and describe, the world. It is a story about savage privilege and deprivation.Haunting the whole is the figure of the real Little Hanako-Rodins model, a Japanese artist displaced in Europe, the medium through which other artists dream and discover the world.