Overview

Sleeplessness renders and explores its speaker's insomnia for the hours between three a.m. and the early morning, presenting a captivating series of reflections on love and desire, language, reading, identity and intersubjectivity. The series of four extended and interlinked poetic sequences moves meditatively and laterally, often in astonishing ways, translating a world of ideas and associations into sensuous language. The poems foreground the beguiling, if troubling, problematics of interpersonal connections and the challenges involved in translating an individual's own experiences-and their experiences of another-into authentic ways of saying and understanding. These poems continuously approach the ineffable, sitting at the boundary between bodily knowledge and language's attempts to catch and name, transforming the idea of in-betweenness into a thrilling threshold between intimacy and strangeness, ardour and uncertainty, and speaking and silence. Night in these poems becomes a doorway into a state of becoming, generating a language that connotes a condition of perpetual and seductive inquiry, asking the reader to understand themselves newly through the act of reading.

Full Product Details

9781953136619

Table of Contents

Reviews

Paul Hetherington has created in SLEEPLESSNESS a travelogue of waking dreams, touring the meanders of the body and of the mind from three to six a.m. Well known for his prose poetry, in this collection he utilizes the page as a visual analogue for ruminations and sensations that arrive in waves, the slight stanzas moving delicately yet relentlessly down and across the page. In four sections, the poems travel far and wide, mapping the night as though it were one of Calvino's invisible cities. Rich in allusion (TALE OF GENJI, THE PILLOW BOOK, Bashō), spare yet lush in language, SLEEPLESSNESS entices the reader to risk traversing the dark in order to partake of its mysteries. Holly Iglesias Author of BOXING INSIDE THE BOX: WOMEN'S PROSE POETRY and SLEEPING THINGS In Paul Hetherington's SLEEPLESSNESS, two lovers traverse a landscape-at once tangible and metaphoric-of insomnia, intimacy, desire, and language. In short lines tight with the tension of waiting, and stanzas like steps between sleep or the moments between touch, this book-length poem explores the 'wildness within our bodies.' Spanning cultures, eras, and mythologies, Hetherington's striking images crackle with electricity, offering shocks of recognition, the page tightening 'as if it's a sail.' We are passengers on this boat of dreams, adrift on the waves of his words, recognizing ourselves in the landscape, its powerful and arduous 'love of betweenness.' Kristin Sanders Author of THIS IS A MAP OF THEIR WATCHING ME, and ORTHOREXIA, and CUNTRY 

Author Information

Paul Hetherington is a distinguished poet and Professor Emeritus at the University of Canberra, Australia. Among his 45 creative and critical books and chapbooks, and numerous scholarly chapters and articles, he has previously published 17 full-length collections of poetry.

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available