The Do-Over

Kathleen Ossip’s much-anticipated third collection of poems presents an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure and recently deceased cultural icons.

List of contents

1

A. in May / 8
Mothers Day / 9
“I’m afraid of death” / 10
Ode / 11
The Road Trip and the Apron String / 15
Lyric / 16

2

Ghost Moon / 28
How can we know the journey from the path? / 29
On Political Crisis / 31
The Great Man is dead, / 32
It’s hard to keep identities / 33
Veterans Day / 34
Amy Winehouse / 35
Steve Jobs / 36
Troy Davis / 37
Lucian Freud, / 38
Donna Summer / 39
Three True Stories / 40
The Millipede / 41

3

A. in January / 44
What is A. / 45
What is Death / 46
Sonnet for A. / 53
Libraries & Museums / 54

4

“No use” / 56
Three Short Lyrics / 58
After / 59

5

On Sadness / 73
The Do-Over / 74
Tool Moan / 75
Words for a Newborn / 76
The Arrival of Spring / 78
Funeral of My Character / 81
One Short Lyric / 82
Oh, wow, mausoleums, / 83

About the author

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Cold War (one of Publishers Weekly's Best Books of 2011), The Search Engine (selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize), and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry, Paris Review, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, The Washington Post, The Believer, A Public Space, and Poetry Review (London). She teaches at The New School in New York and online for The Poetry School of London. She was a founding editor of LIT and is the poetry editor of Women's Studies Quarterly. She has received a fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Summary

Kathleen Ossip’s much-anticipated third collection of poems presents an unsentimental elegy to a mother figure and recently deceased cultural icons.

Foreword

$2500 marketing and publicity budget

Co-op available

Galleys available: national mailings, with special push to publications that have previously published and reviewed Ossip

National review attention, targeting The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, The Believer, The Nation, and Boston Review.

Advertising in American Poetry Review, Poetry, The Writers Chronicle, and others.

Excerpts in Absent, Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day, American Poetry Review, The Atlas Review, At Length, The Awl, The Believer, Boston Review, Court Green, Fence, The Hat, The Literary Review, Magma, MoonLit, Plume, Poetry, A Public Space, and Triquarterly.

Attendance at Association of Writers and Writing Programs, Modern Language Association, and Bread Loaf Writers conferences.

Electronic postcard to announce publication sent to Ossip's contacts

Newsletter and catalog feature mailed to Sarabande's database of contacts

Internet marketing campaign to include announcement on Sarabande national listserv as well as review copy mailing to online journals and blogs

Additional text

"Working in acrostics, chain verse, prose, couplets, quatrains, Ossip's a magpie who pilfers from magpies....[S]he has an eye for 'the light of the culture: gold and misleading' and an ear that saves her wisdom moments from bluntness: 'I see the forest, I see the trees. / What I can't see is the / dappled clearing I'm standing on.' And then she devastates you by removing a single letter from a common poetic word: 'In the clearing, the now is falling.'"
—The Chicago Tribune

"It may be the case that Ossip understands the elasticity and capaciousness of contemporary poetry better than anybody. . . . This is our book."
—NPR

"In as much as it makes sense to talk about writing as perfect, The Do-Over is not, nor does it mean to be. But it is remarkable: unusually alive, intelligent and alert; unusually imaginative in its ways of letting the now fall into poems that find more invitations in impermanence than any others I’ve read recently."
—Slate

"This supremely protean, dexterous poet focuses her reader’s attention on the hinges between the physical and metaphysical, on the reinvention of narrative and metaphor.... Ossip suggests that we let grief enliven us, shake up our language, darken our metaphors, and tear us awake."
—Harvard Review

“Unassuming and masterfully crafted, Ossip’s poetry is sneaky, very often disguising itself as easy and surprising you the moment you let your guard down. . . . The Do-Over is a kind of elegy to contemporary culture: it critiques modern life while basking in its ever-younger, glitzier rabble."
—The Paris Review

"Each of Ossip’s acrostics shows her to be a master of compression, whereas the longer, serial prose-verse poems demonstrate her ability to build longer structures without sacrificing density of language.”
—The Brooklyn Rail

Product details

• Authors: Kathleen Ossip
• Publisher: Ingram Publishers Services
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 03.02.2015
• EAN: 9781936747962
• ISBN: 978-1-936747-96-2
• No. of pages: 96
• Subjects: Fiction > Poetry, drama; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > General and comparative literary studies; POETRY / American / General, POETRY / Women Authors, POETRY / Subjects & Themes / Love & Erotica