Someone Else's Wedding Vows
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
The much-anticipated debut collection from a celebrated young poet, Someone Else's Wedding Vows marks the arrival of an exciting new voice in American poetry.
Someone Else’s Wedding Vows reflects on the different forms of love, which can be both tremendously joyous and devastatingly destructive. The title poem confronts a human ritual of marriage from the standpoint of a wedding photographer. Within the tedium and alienation of the ceremony, the speaker grapples with a strange human hopefulness. In this vein, Stone explores our everyday patterns and customs, and in doing so, exposes them for their complexities. Drawing on the neurological, scientific, psychological, and even supernatural, this collection confronts the difficulties of love and family. Stone rankles with a desire to understand, but the questions she asks are never answered simply. These poems stroll along the abyss, pointing towards the absurdity of our choices. They recede into the imaginative in order to understand and translate the distressing nature of reality. It is a bittersweet question this book raises: Why we are like this? There is no easy answer. So while we look down at our hands, perplexed, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows raises a glass to the future.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Stone's debut offers a captivating mix of lyric and grit, juxtaposing Latinate and colloquial diction in unexpected combinations. Stone is an accomplished visual artist (having illustrated, among other books, Anne Carson's Antigonick), and the penetrating playfulness in her visual work is also present in her poetry, establishing the breadth of the speaker's intellect and imagination while undermining poetic tropes, as in the closing lines of "What It's Like" ("There isn't even/ a sky. And there isn't even a sky behind that") or in "Driving Our New Car" ("I looked in the mirror this morning and I felt my age/ like a tremor from a distant fundraiser"). Each of her introspective speakers is witty and worldly, with a descriptive eye; each celebrates the machinations and mechanics of contemporary America: "Under the simulated/ middleclass environment/ of the fuselage/ the snow was falling." Familial and romantic attachment are central to the collection's thematic concerns, which Stone explores without sacrificing her interest in the universal, evolutionary, and metaphysical. In "Elegy with Judy Garland & Refrigerator," the speaker reflects, "I stand looking at the milk, the rack, the maple,/ and I realize grief wants me to stay/ a child, negotiating a stream of atoms,/ picking flowers. Grief wants me in good condition." Stone's poems astutely and honestly address the longing and cost of human connections.
