Donna de la Perrière, Saint Erasure
Cover image: “Danvers State Asylum,” photograph by John Gray
ISBN: 978‑1‑58498‑076-6, paper, $13.95
“In Saint Erasure, we may witness, with the leisure of true virtue, poetry’s essential miracle. A little tap upon a windowpane becomes the paraclete. The curve of a cheekbone becomes eternal love, and memory an ocean. Here is a radiant palimpsest. Here is vision awash in vision itself.” --Donald Revell
“Donna de la Perrière’s consummately crafted lines extend the argument of postmodern lyric into a space of mystery.”
--Andrew Joron
“Anyone who still wants to view experimentation as a purely intellectual exercise will be convinced otherwise by Donna de la Perrière’s exquisite second collection. Under the threat or promise of erasure and at the edge of silence, the poet deftly leads us through a shifting, minimalist landscape. Wrestling with change and stasis, with the resistance and sudden give of the real, she delicately monitors each stage of what feels like a pilgrimage, while defamiliarization pressures vision and makes each breath at once artful and endlessly brave. Saint Erasure saves us by exposing the beauty of our vulnerability: ‘Welcome
to the new body / tonight we lose everything.’” --Laura Mullen
“In Donna de la Perrière’s luminous Saint Erasure, the parenthetical (and all that is either added or taken from its limber arms) regains its stature as Paraclete. In this moving book, absence is a measurement, a fact of duration, a sound in time, and reading I am immersed in that sound’s mourning—for first self, for father, for Woman and the history of category that contains Her, as well as for the human body that each must relinquish. Here, physical law is what guides and though the poet, despite postmodernism’s plethora of claims, is not a biologist, it is nonetheless in the recognition of the ultimate ‘desertion’ of physical life that Poetry, in the hands of a poet as wise as de la Perrière, stakes its powerful claim: it helps us die.” --Claudia Keelan
"Thoughtful and thought provoking." --Midwest Book Review
Website:
www.donnadelaperriere.net
Interviews:
http://talismanarchive.weebly.com/interview.html
http://creosotejournal.com/2011/04/crime-and-other-mysteries-donna-de-la-perriere/
Reviews:
http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/saint-erasure
http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/saint-erasure/
http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/default_files/archive/2011-03-03/#Saint-Erasure-by-Donna-de-la-Perriere
Donna de la Perrière is the author of True Crime (Talisman House, 2009). The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry award, she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University and curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series.
ISBN: 978‑1‑58498‑076-6, paper, $13.95
“In Saint Erasure, we may witness, with the leisure of true virtue, poetry’s essential miracle. A little tap upon a windowpane becomes the paraclete. The curve of a cheekbone becomes eternal love, and memory an ocean. Here is a radiant palimpsest. Here is vision awash in vision itself.” --Donald Revell
“Donna de la Perrière’s consummately crafted lines extend the argument of postmodern lyric into a space of mystery.”
--Andrew Joron
“Anyone who still wants to view experimentation as a purely intellectual exercise will be convinced otherwise by Donna de la Perrière’s exquisite second collection. Under the threat or promise of erasure and at the edge of silence, the poet deftly leads us through a shifting, minimalist landscape. Wrestling with change and stasis, with the resistance and sudden give of the real, she delicately monitors each stage of what feels like a pilgrimage, while defamiliarization pressures vision and makes each breath at once artful and endlessly brave. Saint Erasure saves us by exposing the beauty of our vulnerability: ‘Welcome
to the new body / tonight we lose everything.’” --Laura Mullen
“In Donna de la Perrière’s luminous Saint Erasure, the parenthetical (and all that is either added or taken from its limber arms) regains its stature as Paraclete. In this moving book, absence is a measurement, a fact of duration, a sound in time, and reading I am immersed in that sound’s mourning—for first self, for father, for Woman and the history of category that contains Her, as well as for the human body that each must relinquish. Here, physical law is what guides and though the poet, despite postmodernism’s plethora of claims, is not a biologist, it is nonetheless in the recognition of the ultimate ‘desertion’ of physical life that Poetry, in the hands of a poet as wise as de la Perrière, stakes its powerful claim: it helps us die.” --Claudia Keelan
"Thoughtful and thought provoking." --Midwest Book Review
Website:
www.donnadelaperriere.net
Interviews:
http://talismanarchive.weebly.com/interview.html
http://creosotejournal.com/2011/04/crime-and-other-mysteries-donna-de-la-perriere/
Reviews:
http://www.drunkenboat.com/db15/saint-erasure
http://www.constantcritic.com/karla_kelsey/saint-erasure/
http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/default_files/archive/2011-03-03/#Saint-Erasure-by-Donna-de-la-Perriere
Donna de la Perrière is the author of True Crime (Talisman House, 2009). The recipient of a 2009 Fund for Poetry award, she teaches in the MFA and undergraduate creative writing programs at California College of the Arts and San Francisco State University and curates the Bay Area Poetry Marathon reading series.