I Entered Without Words - (Princeton Contemporary Poets) by Jody Gladding (Hardcover)

About the Book

"This collection is one of two manuscripts recently chosen by Susan Stewart for the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, which is dedicated to publishing the best work of today's emerging and established poets. We publish one to two titles per year as selected by the series editor. The series began in 1975 with the publication of Sadness and Happiness: Poems by Robert Pinsky, and has published landmark collections by such poets as Ann Lauterbach and Jorie Graham. I entered without words is a new collection of poems by the poet and translator Jody Gladding. Using unusual visual and verbal forms, Gladding constructs poems that, in her words, allow readers 'to move about the page as they please--there is no right or wrong way to proceed. The poem opens into a three-dimensional space where things can happen simultaneously. And differently with each reading.' Creating many paths for readers across the page through word placements and font choices, Gladding constructs scenes that blend the surreal, the domestic, and the natural world to raise questions about language, poetic form, and representation. Some of the poems have facing-page French versions that further extend the reader's sense of exploration"--

Book Synopsis

An innovative and inviting book of poems about the places where language and landscape converge

In this strongly visual and environmentally engaged collection, award-winning poet and translator Jody Gladding explores landscape as a source of language in lyrics that operate as physical acts in three-dimensional space.

Composed and printed in a landscape format, these minimal, quiet, playful, meditative, and open-ended poems are experimental in form and inviting in subject. Drawing inspiration from poets like A. R. Ammons, Lorine Niedecker, Gustaf Sobin, and Jean Valentine, and visual artists like Ann Hamilton, Roni Horn, and Cecilia Vicuña, Gladding discovers exciting spatial possibilities within the page itself by exploiting white space and varying typefaces. As the page opens into the compositional field that Mallarmé, Ponge, and others conceived it to be, words constellate around bolded through lines to offer multiple, interwoven meanings, interacting with each other and the reader, who moves freely among them, to make poems that are spatial, nonlinear, and different with each reading. And, adding yet another dimension to the collection, many of the poems have facing-page French versions.

"Landscape-oriented" in every sense, I entered without words is an ambitious, innovative, and striking collection by a major poet.

Review Quotes

"An exciting odyssey through . . . three-dimensional pages, where sparse words make up what looks like gravitational fields."---Susan McCabe, Los Angeles Review of Books

"[An] intriguing new collection. . . . Readers with a taste for experimental poetry will be delighted."-- "Seven Days"

"A delicate and dynamic work, one that reaches toward a painterly simultaneity. One can, as the title suggests, enter the poems without words, only to find fields of them scattered across the pages, in spacious formations, at times rippling or craggy, ready to be combined and recombined."---Heather Green, Poetry Foundation

"Formally innovative. . . . [An] impressionistic, lyric work with an experimental edge."-- "Publishers Weekly"

About the Author

Jody Gladding is a poet and translator who has published four previous collections of poetry. Her awards include MacDowell and Stegner fellowships, the French-American Foundation Translation Prize, the Whiting Award, and the Yale Younger Poets Prize. She lives in East Calais, Vermont.