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by Chessy Normile (Author), Li-Young Lee (Introduction by)
Winner of the 2020 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Chessy Normile's debut collection, Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, asks what would happen if we actually believed language to be a creative force that constructs our lived experience. Though "hope" is something we assign to the future, these poems disrupt time in order to be hopeful about the past. They could be funny all the time, but often choose not to be in the critical moment, using humor to become more vulnerable rather than less. Chessy Normile's poetry is, according to Li-Young Lee, "smart, curious, original, and authentically weird."
Front Jacket
These poems are full of ideas zipping by, ricocheting off each other, and fueled by a desire to know, to understand. The speaker wants out. Her sentences and lines search for an Archimedean point beyond the inadequate accounts of the world she's inherited. The speaker wants in. Deeper in. To the heart of the matter. I have no idea if the author of these poems consciously invented their speaker, or if the poems are actually the confessions of a psyche completely exposed to something like the creative unconscious. The subject of the majority of these poems is synchronous experience, otherwise known as acausal ordered-ness, which would account for their fidelity to their moment of composition and their drive not toward non-meaning, but meanings beyond the precincts of mentality and its calculations. --from the Introduction by Li-Young Lee
