Floating City - (Walt Whitman Award of the Academy of American Poets) by Anne Pierson Wiese (Paperback)

About the Book

This debut collection of poems is centered around the idea of place. Wiese personifies mundane locales and ordinary objects, filling them with life, emotions, and new meanings all their own. She emphasizes the importance of transcending our daily routines to truly absorb the world as though we were experiencing it for the first time. Although many of these poems are set in New York City, natural environments like botanical gardens often take center stage.

Book Synopsis

Anne Pierson Wiese's first collection of poems illuminates the everyday and the lessons to be learned amid life's routines. The poems in Floating City might be called poetry of place. Many are set in New York City, but they simultaneously inhabit a realm in which a mundane physical location or daily exchange can be seen to have human significance beyond the immediate. When one dismisses from one's mind the idea that going to the park, doing the laundry, buying a sandwich, and riding the subway are familiar experiences, one makes room for the actual to ally with the hypothetical by means of the emotions. The result, Wiese eloquently shows, is a form of truth that is silently generated whenever human beings earnestly endeavor to absorb the world.

About the Author

Anne Pierson Wiese was born in Minneapolis and raised in Brooklyn. She was the recipient of the 2004 "Discovery"/The Nation Poetry Prize and a 2005 New York Foundation for the Arts Poetry Fellowship. Her poems have appeared in numerous publications, including The Nation, Southwest Review, Prairie Schooner, Raritan, Carolina Quarterly, and others. She currently resides with her husband in New York City.