Poetry. The series of poems in Maxine Chernoff's WITHOUT are elegiac brushstrokes, each somewhat feathery and brushing in more than one direction, which creates tension and unexpected arrivals as well as departures: someone or something is missing. Parts of the world are wavering and parts have disappeared. What remains is treated in the subtle management of the lines without a hint of punctuation, which allows for "waves" of attention, as meaning rises and subsides. The emotional impact is powerful, as are the recognitions, such as "when darkness loses / its waiting mirror / and tuning forks / stand in for solace" and "readers asleep / mouthing their dreams / fears of whispering / become a creed / until life blurs / like any lens / that fails at attention." There's a sense of meaning passing with the solidity and darkness of time. "The protagonist of these fifty brilliantly condensed elliptical poems never feels sorry for herself: she knows only too well that 'no currency / buys your / erasure.' And she can even smile at the thought that 'maybe you'll freeze / trying to forget / how things were / before they weren't....' Indeed, one thing Maxine Chernoff is never without is an unfailing tact--a dazzling inventiveness that distances the pain and transforms it into verbal pleasure. As in Emily Dickinson's lyric, 'After great pain a formal feeling comes.'"--Marjorie Perloff

Poetry. "Maxine Chernoff's THE TURNING turns at the moment 'when we survive our disappearances,' 'when murder chastises history,' in other words, right now - when all that's left is the leveled playing field of the page, where graffiti scrawled on a wall is just as likely to carry import as Kristeva or Emerson or 'memory or Memorex.' In stanzas taut as guitar strings - or purse strings pulled tight against the chest - these poems recall a kind of classic Ahkmatovan cry (though they never plangent) combined with a Tsvetaeva-like pluckiness, all of which gets overridden by Chernoff's supreme humanity, ferocity, intelligence, wit, honesty: 'I had thought I knew how the world would end, but all I really know is how to stare and point.' Then the book takes yet another turn, beyond the staring and pointing" - Gillian Conoley.

Poetry. CAMERA is both paean and lament for a world in flux. To render such a world with its unresolvable tensions between time's embodiment and erasure is the focus of the collection. What does it mean to hold many irreconcilable presences? The task is to measure small changes, arrivals and departures. The work is a border between existence and disappearance. Moments named and described are "framed." Though the created world with its emotional truths will not last, it is a topography of words and a realm of heightened scrutiny. To hold and revere its presence is the poem's agency. A world is predicated by representation of nature, seasons, ritual, location, and the arts. Loss looming, love is attention given and the human bond holding writer and reader. "'I lifted to mind a piece of bright blue air, ' wrote Robert Creeley, in a line Maxine Chernoff quotes in CAMERA. It's apt: this is a book full of air and breezes, populated with doves and thrushes, swallows and crows. It's an earthy book, too, where tender roots push through an eroticized earth ('thigh of hill/breast of leaves/belly of witness'). It's never just a book of the body, though, or of the material world: each sharply sensed moment spirals out into history, geography, biology, or grief. It is a book where the world aspires to be voiced, and where words 'send their tendrils toward the next refrain.' CAMERA lifts a world to mind, and holds it there." --Robert Archambeau

"World", Maxine Chernoff's first full-length collection of poetry in ten years, explores the borders of personal and group experience, public and private language. From brief riffs on jazz to prose poem dialogues to long sequences about Emerson's essays and the problematic relationship of Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe ("World"), she examines the range of poetic possibility in "linguistic cuts and connections" that surprise the mind and ear.Like her more recent previous collections, "New Faces of 1952", "Japan", and "Leap Year Day", "World" is written in a mixture of styles and tones from the sonic, terse lyrics of the sequence "World" and the ten poems based on Emerson's essays to the vernacular of the prose poems, which are lively, dialogue-based explorations of relationships.Part One of "World" consists of individual poems that examine the relation of language to reality at the seams of representation. From collisions of the language of the personal and public in such poems as "Todorov at Ellis Island," "Politics," "Transactional" and "Next Song" to poems like "Nature Morte" and "The North Sea" that interrogate the relation of the world as object to the world as subject, Chernoff is interested in the meaning of the poetic act and its repercussions. Nothing is solid or sealed in these poems but rather in flux, nervous movement between the certainty of intention and the imperfection of words.Part Two, "World," is a poem in twenty-one movements, an "account" of the relationship between Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stielitz in all of its complex loyalties. "How can I be jealous of a place?" the aged Stieglitz asks his reluctant partner and muse. How her own art and the New Mexico landscape vied for her affections is the story of their pained love. The poems, fragmented and abstract, explore the landscape of their long relationship.Part Three appropriates the language of some of Emerson's famous essays to discuss the American thinker in essential, stripped-down poems.Part Four of "World" consists of prose poems, many of them dialogues reminiscent of short Pinteresque plays. The tension and illogic of human desires are examined in confrontations between two unnamed speakers, often a man and woman. These stark and comic prose poems are the latest of Chernoff's work in this genre, which she has been exploring for nearly thirty years.A strong and varied collection, World is certain to please new readers and reassure those familiar with her work of her consistent project.

Poetry. "Among the Names clicks along, making fast connections, which in turn create a vast and layered network--in short, an economy. Exploring the complexities of "the gift," Chernoff's is an economy of the uncanny. It's a collection that makes things spring to sight"--Cole Swensen. Be sure to check out Maxine Chernoff's other books, including EVOLUTION OF THE BRIDGE, WORLD & SOME OF HER FRIENDS THAT YEAR, all available from SPD.

Review Adjectives Anger Animal Magnetism Beginnning, Middle, End Biographia Literaria Birthday Poem Breasts The Color Red A Concise History Of The United States The Edible Harp Factotum For Daily Use For The Notice Frankly Futuresong Hairdo How We Went Identity Principle Learning To Listen Liarium Lost And Found Machinery March Miss Congeniality A Name Obbligato For My 29th Birthay Oh Poem For Ted A Problem Prophecy Public Outrage Sayings Of My Distant Uncle The Sheik Of Araby The Smell Convention Some Noise The Song The Soprano's Revenge Sotto Voce Speedreading Homer Spring Subterranean Tenderitis A Theory Of Tears To The Reader Tragedy On Ice The Unzipped A Visionary Disease Waiting For Malene Dietrich -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder®