Life in Handkerchiefs
Life in Handkerchiefs
Life in Handkerchiefs is a tale of female life via vintage hankies mingled with poems and meditations, along with crocheted edging, lace, artificial flower trimmings, and various notions. This book is about growing up in the category “female,” resultant curiosities, bizarre vagaries of gender, body thoughts, the quotidian, mother-daughter relationships, life span, and historical and inner life along with a sense (always vital to DuPlessis’s work) of the mystery and oddity of existence. Given the various narratives and feelings evoked by “texting” us with thoughts on gender via little scraps of fabric, Life in Handkerchiefs makes a wry gift book in many moods, and telling surprising backstories, -- jaunty, somber, droll, aphoristic, rueful, yearning, ironic, critical, suspicious, and compassionate.
With 51 full-color reproductions of DuPlessis’s hybrid poem-collages, Life in Handkerchiefs is a generous volume of poetry that blends visual material with linguistic exploration.
About the author:
Poet, editor, and scholar Rachel Blau DuPlessis earned a BA from Barnard College and a PhD from Columbia University. Her special interests are in modern and contemporary poetry, especially issues of gender, the long poem, and cultural poetics. She is one of the foremost critics of her generation, and her works of scholarship include Purple Passages: Pound, Eliot, Zukofsky, Olson, Creeley and the Ends of Patriarchal Poetry (2012), Blue Studios: Poetry and its Cultural Work (2006), Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 (2001), The Pink Guitar: Writing as Feminist Practice (1990), H.D.: The Career of That Struggle (1986), and Writing Beyond the Ending: Narrative Strategies of Twentieth-Century Women Writers (1985). DuPlessis’s many honors and awards include a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Roy Harvey Pearce/Archive for New Poetry Prize, Temple University’s Creative Achievement Award, and grants from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts and the Fund for Poetry.
Publication Details:
Life in Handkerchiefs is published by Materialist Press in 2023, an imprint of Cereal Box Studio in Cincinnati, OH. Edited by Rivka Weinstock and Ariel Resnikoff, and designed by Julia Warner. 8”x10,” 118 pages, perfect bound paperback, 51 full-color reproductions of hybrid poem-collages. ISBN 978-1-7335169-7-6.