Keynote
The extraordinary first poetry collection by the renowned painter and sculptor Dorothea Tanning
Book Title
A Table of Content
Subtitle
Poems
Cover Image
- “[Tanning] is our most surprising new poet. She is an audacious dreamer, and the spirit of creativity, the sheer joy of making things, is everywhere apparent in her restless, inventive, energetic and triumphant first book of poems.”—Washington Post Book World
Body
Finally, on second, in bras. Bras swarming everywhere,
giant pink moths at rest, their empty cups clamoring,
"Fill me."
-from "End of the Day on Second"
Dorothea Tanning is an exceptional visual artist, and now, in her nineties, she has become an exceptional poet. In A Table of Content, we are made to see more clearly the city landscape, the creative impulse, and the worlds of potential disaster and sensual erotics with a vision that survives taste, trend, and time.
giant pink moths at rest, their empty cups clamoring,
"Fill me."
-from "End of the Day on Second"
Dorothea Tanning is an exceptional visual artist, and now, in her nineties, she has become an exceptional poet. In A Table of Content, we are made to see more clearly the city landscape, the creative impulse, and the worlds of potential disaster and sensual erotics with a vision that survives taste, trend, and time.
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About the Author
Credit: Sylvia Plachy
Praise
- “[Tanning] prefers ‘emerging poet.’ ‘Oldest living emerging poet,’ she will say when she’s among friends, lifting a glass—champagne is served at Tanning’s from five to seven…”—from a profile in the New Yorker
- “Some would call these poems collages, finery glued into dreamy images. But I prefer to call the whole of them a kaleidoscope—angled feelings and dappled ideas constantly shape-shifting into remarkable new patterns, by turns giddy and grave. And when you put the little device down, you realize you’ve all along been looking at your own life, grandly re-imagined by a master. Dorothea Tanning’s verbal wizardry is a constant surprise, an abiding delight, and readers who sit down to A Table of Content can expect to stand up more strangely themselves. She wears her soul on her sleeve, and it shines, it shines!”—J. D. McClatchy
- “Dorothea Tanning’s sidewise way of ‘wanting at last to get things/ straight and all of a piece’ glances off the walls and mirrors of a robust and particular intelligence. With a blend of innocent expression and earthly sophistication she sets loose multiple lives, on of which begins after the palanquin breaks down; ones in which everything is awake and speaking to her: the food in the fridge (‘Don’t call it icebox’), inventory in a department store, objects on a table, beloved and lost landscapes. Experienced with disquieting and devastating endings notwithstanding, none of these lives is defeated. Tanning passes from ‘indifferent windows’ to ‘naked bits of think’ and offers her ‘wild entire’: ‘trailing a scarf of history in/ case of weather and nothing to read.’ A Table of Content, a meal not to be late for.”—C.D. Wright
