ABOUT THIS BOOK

Maggie Nelson provides the first extended consideration of the roles played by women in and around the New York School of poets, from the 1950s to the present, and offers unprecedented analyses of the work of Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, Eileen Myles, and abstract painter Joan Mitchell as well as a reconsideration of the work of many male New York School writers and artists from a feminist perspective.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Maggie Nelson is a poet and essayist on the faculty of the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. She is the author of a book of nonfiction, The Red Parts: A Memoir, as well as several books of poetry, including Jane: A Murder (finalist, PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir), The Latest Winter, and Shiner. A fourth collection of poems, Something Bright, Then Holes, is forthcoming.

REVIEWS

"After decades of listening (enthralled, of course) to the knitted ribbon-dress observations of John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler, finally, the other serious ladies of the necessarily 'so called' New York School--Joan Mitchell, Barbara Guest, Bernadette Mayer, Alice Notley, and Eileen Myles--are invited to give their full throated response. Smart as a whip and fun as an after hours bar, Maggie Nelson gets fresh with heretofore queerly ignored matters poetic, aesthetic, and feminist. Rearranging the school's classroom seating, illuminating details, all the while demonstrating how crucial not caring is to care, Nelson remaps the 'one flow' of poetry. Let me blunt: reading her bravura study's like spying on Joan Jett taking Helen Vendler for a joyride."--Bruce Hainley

"So many times over the years I’ve been asked, What’s it like to be a woman in rock music? It’s always been sort of a paralyzing question-to answer it is to give the question itself meaning. Maggie Nelson here opens it all up for examination with this incredibly timely and astute book."-Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth

"Maggie Nelson is deft and revelatory in bringing sociological as well as psychological, stylistic, and political insights to bear on her title terms, ‘women’ and ‘the New York School.’ She lays bare an obscured history, performs imaginative and incisive readings of careers as well as books and poems, and foots her way with exciting skill through the overlapping minefields of professional, national, and sexual politics."--Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, author, A Dialogue on Love

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

Tales in and out of School: An Introduction

Part One

Abstract Practices: The Art of Joan Mitchell, Barbara Guest, and Their Others

Getting Particular: Gender at Play in the Work of John Ashbery, Frank O’Hara, and James Schuyler

Part Two

What Life Isn’t Daily? The Gratuitous Art of Bernadette Mayer

Dear Dark Continent: Alice Notley’s Disobediences

When We’re Alone in Public: The Metabolic Work of Eileen Myles

Afterword

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

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